Supcoop,

I don't think there are any useful escapement numbers for the Snohomish or elsewhere that pre-date hatchery supplementation. The earliest in the Snohomish are probably the trap-and-haul records from Sunset Falls on the SF Sky.

Why steelhead supplementation began is an interesting question. Salmon fish culturists had learned in the 1930s and 40s that juvenile salmon needed to be reared and not released as unfed fry in order to produce any meaningful adult return. Early culturists had also tried producing steelhead by releasing unfed fry, but there was no monitoring. And by the early 1940s steelhead managers appear to have concluded that steelhead fry releases were most likely a waste of otherwise good broodstock. It was about that time that WDG's Pautzke and Meigs discovered that they could compress a juvenile steelhead's two-year freshwater rearing life history into one year in the warmer spring water at the south Tacoma trout hatchery near Chambers Creek. The rest, as they say, is history.

Just as hatchery reared trout had made spring time trout fishing viable on numerous lowland lakes that previously had marginal, or even no, fishing, Pautzke expressed the opinion that hatchery steelhead would enhance winter steelhead fishing, making the passtime more productive and attract more anglers. In those days, WDG got nearly 100% of its funding from license sales. I suspect that it seemed like a good marketing plan.

By most indicators, steelhead populations were always far less than salmon populations. But even 1940 steelhead runs average quite a bit larger than what we see today, and what seemed like the good runs of the 1980s were less than the runs of the 1940s and perhaps only slightly less than the runs of the 1960s. I have to draw that conclusion inferentially from old catch data, so while credible, it's not supported by extremely strong evidence.

Extant summer and winter populations could be described as stable in a very dynamic way, with wide annual fluctuation, but the official PS status review describes them as declining, and hence, threatened with extinction within 100 years. And harvest is not a proximate factor for decline in the last couple decades, since total harvest of wild PS steelhead is 4% or less. The topic that I think is very much up for debate is whether or not most PS steelhead populations are at the carrying capacity of current habitat conditions. I think they are. If so, then that makes the subject of recovery under the ESA rather troubling. How do you recover a population that is already at the carrying capacity of its habitat? The conventional answer is that you must increase the capacity and or the productivity of the habitat. And just how do we do that with a state population that increases by over 50,000 humans each year?

Regarding the occurrence of large catches of wild steelhead in the same seasons as larger catches of hatchery steelhead doesn't mean unclipped hatchery steelhead were counted as wild fish. It is better explained by the fact that when ocean conditions are good for wild steelhead, they are also good for hatchery steelhead. So the respective runsizes of hatchery and wild steelhead generally do go up and down in unison. We make that observation region wide.

Sg