I think that pre-devlopment there were significantly more spawning salmon. The majority of studies that have quantified benefit of spawners directly feeding rearing juveniles (pink/chum feeding coho/steehead) seem to peak out at about 2 kilograms of spawner per square metre at SLF. Just plug that into something the size of the Skagit. We put 90K chum, successfully, into 2 miles of Kennedy Creek. The Stilly is how much longer??

We actually have seen these densities, and higher, in some streams. Whenever I have conversations with bios, they think-for example-that a million pinks in the Green was a lot and we should see huge ecosystem benefits. A million was a drop in the proverbial bucket and that is the disconnect. A manager looks at numbers and then tries to minimize the spawners to maximize the harvest.

I would add that when I started out, on a steelhead research project, that WDG believed a single pair of steelhead was sufficient to seed a mile of creek. So, the creek we were on was "adequately" seeded with 14 fish. Yeah.

As I noted above, if you want to clean the gravel, pack it with spawners. That has been shown to be the most cost-effective way to do it.