In the case on Chinook we found that doing everything by the numbers we could not broodstock them in a stressful situation. It was simply that females were pouring everything into egg development while waiting to move upstream to spawn. The water temps created a situation that the capture put such a strain on the females that they simply could not recover regardless of what we did. Males on the other hand breezed right through the process. The solution was to stop and wait for the environmental conditions to improve. It still took a huge effort to get past this issue. In fact we damn near had to treat the females unmarked or injured as if it had been seriously wounded.

It cuts across all things living. You interfere or disturb a females natural processes while in the reproductive process and nothing and I mean nothing good comes from it. Males do much much better. My wife once said she knew god was a man because if god was a she males would have the task of bringing our young into the world.