Lots of forage fish out there! Those increased populations of seals, sea lions, mergansers, cormorants, harbor porpoise, and river otters simply cannot exist primarily on salmon/steelhead smolt or rockfish. But when there is a rush of food such as outbound smolts or the other swing of the food availability pendulum pushes predators onto rockfish as a food source they have an immense adverse impact and particularly on those ESA listed species we are trying to recover.

Example: Remember the mackerel invasion of the PNW some years ago? The Canadians released Barkley Sound smolts directly into that curtain of death and they were decimated. South Sound releases face different predators but the smolt loss is huge.

My belief is that the aggregate impact of predators is a significant limiting factor in recovery of many of our ESA listed species.