Sounds like f and w and these scientists need to do a little more research to figure out why these fish have such $hitty ocean survival rates.
Fish and wildlifes Job is to protect and preserve our natural resources, right?


With return rates like that, that's money well spent. Not

I think your math needs a little work there Salmo, the return is nowhere near 0.01%. Based on todays Jan 16th report, the hatcheries on the Nooksack, Stilly, Sky, and Snoqualmie rivers have returned a grand total of 112 fish to their respective collection facilities. The total plant on these rivers was 486,767.

That would be a return of .00023%.

A return of .01% from that years plant would have returned almost 5,000 fish, which in recent years would be a normal and acceptable return.

I think it's safe to say the Chambers Creek hatchery program is on the verge of complete collapse.

On a more important note, it really sucks the Skagit/Sauk fishery is closed...again.

Ike

So there Archimedes, based on the numbers I posted above, how many fish would you have to plant to have a viable recreational fishery on these rivers?

Ike

Sorry Ike, but it isn't Salmo that needs to check their arithmetic. You are off by a factor of 100. Where you say that a return rate of .01% would have returned 5000 fish, it actually would have returned only 50 fish. Why? Because .01% = .0001, so multiple roughly 500,000 smolts x .0001 and you get 50, not 5000.

Put another way, your calculation of the return rate is also off by a factor of 100:

112 returns divided by 486,767 releases = .00023 but to turn that into a percentage you multiple by 100. That makes your estimated return rate .023%, 2.3 times what Salmo suggested.

I barely graduated high school, and can safely say that Ikissmykiss needs to work on his math

SAD F'in state of affairs...Wild Steelhead are functionally extinct. Humans are pretty disgusting animals,on par w roaches, fleas and mosquitos. Cheers

Plant half a million smolt to get back 100.... J F C!

Lol! You're right, my math does need some work. I knew what I was trying to say.
Unfortunately, you can put the decimal point and percentage sign anywhere you want and this will still be an unprecedented piss poor return of hatchery (and possibly wild) steelhead to our rivers.

Ike

Steelhead evolved to require repeat spawners. I have seen data from AK and Kamchatka where the run is 50-90% repeats. I had thought, way back, that steelhead were just big trout and letting the whole population spawn once (works well for trout) would work for them. It doesn't. Somehow, we need to find ways to significantly increase the number of repeats along with all the other recovery actions.

A summerrun sighting!!!

Repeat females spawners can be important to population stability in at least part because those repeat spawners tend to have significantly more eggs than the first time they spawned. Have noted that as marine survival declines the portion of a returning steelhead population average age declines. See fewer fish with longer periods of marine rearing; the portion of say 3-salt fish decline. It may be the case that that elevated mortality continues in at least some degree the entire time the fish are at see.

Let's look what a repeat spawner rate of say 75% really means. It means that the productivity of the population is so low that it takes 4 spawners to produce one fish the next generation. What one typically sees as one moves to the north fringe of the steelhead range we see increasing rates of repeat spawners. Move beyond that extreme range of steelhead; say northern Alaska or eastern Kamchatka the O. mykiss no longer express the anadromous life history - only find resident rainbows.

From what we know of the biology of O. mykiss as the productivity of rivers have declined the resident life history likely becomes more important. I would argue that for most of the Puget Sound rivers the combination of freshwater habitat loss and poor marine survival has driven the over-all productivity to where continuing presences of O. mykiss maintaining the resident life history is essential. In effect the productivity of those waters has been driven below that which supports anadromy - much like those waters beyond the extremes of steelhead distribution.

To that point it should be obvious that a significant management paradigm is needed to encourage the expansion of the resident rainbow populations in our rivers. That change requires total bait bans (selective gear rules) to reduce incidental hooking impacts as well zero bag limits every where in the anadromous zones. That sort has been a difficult sell to both WDFW and the angling public.

Curt

It never occurred to me before, but now that you mention it, it makes a lot of sense that the repeat spawning life history does a lot to explain how hatchery steelhead programs are so much less productive than salmon programs. I have never heard of hatcheries releasing spawned steelhead to migrate back out to sea, potentially to return and spawn again. I wonder why that is? If you are trying to replenish a natural resource with artificial production, it stands to reason you'll get better outcomes if you mimic, to the greatest extent possible, a natural life history for the species in question. I would imagine an adult steelhead is much more likely to survive another year at sea than a smolt is to survive its first year at sea. By that rationale, repeat spawners probably find their way back to the gravel at a much higher rate than smolts spending their first year(s) at sea.

I don't think gillnetting is a leading cause of the decline, but I do wonder how many rebrights and repeat spawners die trying to migrate back and forth....

Plant fish instead of scientific Blah Blah.

Remove 10 guys pensions and plant fish with the coin.

Do it again and again until we get more back then just lame excuses.

Thanks for the addition Curt. Respawners are essential to species diversity and overall population productivity. However, a run made up of too many respawners, as Curt points out, indicates a very low productivity of new recruits in the population. High respawner rates at the northern margin of the species occurrence makes sense considering the overall lower productivity of rivers at those latitudes. Unfortunately it's become too easy to forget that WA and OR are, or were, the center for steelhead as a species, and the region where the species enjoyed its highest rates of productivity. Respawner rates of 12 or 13% are normal and indicative of a high rate of new recruits in each cohort of steelhead. Darn near makes my head explode to think of how much we actually had here and how very little is left.

And to WDFW X 1 = 0's credit as the resident fucktard whisperer, 10 pensions wouldn't produce the 112 steelhead that have returned to Puget Sound this year. It looks like love ain't the only thing money can't buy.

Salmo G

Proudly creating excuses, representing TPU's best interests, and planting less fish for a generation.

I have asked, at a number of the Pacific Coast Steelhead Management Meetings, for a single data set of wild steelhead where the R/S averaged greater than 1.0. Nobody from AK, BC, WA, OR, or CA could provide data from a single stock.

So, while as Curt says, further north repeats are a larger fraction, they re required everywhere. Some data showed that CA and OR, along with BC and AK, had fairly good numbers of repeats it was WA that had them in low single percentages. An artifact of fishing methods and locations?

" An artifact of fishing methods and locations?"

Yes, for the coast and Puget Sound, but more likely because of dams on the Columbia River system. With improved conservation measures in the late 70s and 80s, respawner rates hit that 12% and 13% in north PS rivers at least.

Summerun... AP... Ike...

J F C what's next? A Coley drive-by?

Welcome home, boyz!

Because I live in an area that in my life time has watched 20-30 pound steelhead go from MANY to FEW.

We all watched as Washington State now allows NO sport caught Native/Wild steelhead to be retained, UNLESS you are on a tribal river.

You can point finger at what has caused decline on Large Steelhead. The bottom line is sports probably should have been curtailed years before when they were and Tribal gill nets that in my area targeted early hatchery steelhead, UNTIL WDFW stopped many of the early plants of winter run steelhead. QIN now nets November until late, April/May, as we all know that is Native steelhead timing, and what I can't find is "how many spawned steelhead get caught in nets, on way to ocean....thus never get a chance to spawn a 2nd or more times.....

It'd be nice to see WDFW and tribe, set a date when NO FISHING is allowed when the majority of Native steelhead are in the systems....for 4 or 5 cycles of these fish. What is going on now....JUST ISN'T WORKING!!!