Piper, you have touched on a number of possible issues affecting South Sound generated salmonoids but as I asked - What has changed?

The Alder dam on the Nisqually went on line in late 1945 which does not correlate to the time line for the extreme increase in smolt mortality. And has Alder dam actually caused an increase in water temps in the river below the dam?

Also, as has been discussed on other threads Lake Washington and Puget Sound have seen huge amounts of money spent on sanitary sewage treatment facilities over the last 30-40 years resulting in much cleaner (from human waste) waters. At the same time smolt survival has dropped. One might even argue that the loss of human waste as a fertilizer has decreased nutrients in Lk WA and P.S. decreasing marine flora and bottom of the food chain organisms thereby adversely affecting the entire food chain.

Unfortunately, what we are now seeing is sanitary system waste water contaminated with new chemicals such as PBDE surprisingly (to me) found in the Nisqually. My limited knowledge is that those types of complex compounds are not removed during even tertiary waste water treatment.

Is there more to learn? Absolutely. But at the same time we should not be ignoring the obvious even if it is not politically correct. And if our society with full disclosure is still willing to accept the loss of salmonoids to the various marine and avian predators we will be hard pressed to overcome that mentality.

As for ling I would suggest they are far more of an impediment to rockfish recovery than to smolt mortality.