If I remember correctly, someone told me that one of the Tribal hatcheries were experimenting in holding hand spawned hen steelhead in tanks, giving them seeing what could be done to get them healthy before releasing them, things like putting into salt water tanks, feeding them and giving them antibodies, etc. . The hope was to get a high percentage of hatchery or brood stock repeat spawners. Has anyone heard of any experiments in doing this, and if so what the results were, and if not, then why not?

I know this has been tried off and on since the 70s. Also know that some hatchery steelhead were "reconditioned" and put into lowland lakes for OD.

My team did try steelhead reconditioning. First thing is you need them into a reconditioning pond to start as soon as you can, the longer you hold them the greater the mortality. Second your going to need a more than one barrel of formalin. ( fungus ) Then getting them on feed to build up their strength is critical and floating feed works best.

Now straight to a lake just as soon they arrive at a hatchery works best but most hatcheries cannot do that as eggtake is important. Bottom line it can be done but you will loose around half of the adults. Then when you get them into a lake strangely enough they do not bite well until late summer and then they are as aggressive as can be. No idea why other than it takes that long to get themselves right.

I think that the Yakama Nation has been doing this consistently longer than anyone else I know. Here are links to some of their project reports:

CRITFC Steelhead Kelt Reconditioning

Yakama Nation Steelhead Kelt Reconditioning

And a presentation to the PSMFC (For some reason the link procedure wouldn't work here:
https://www.psmfc.org/steelhead/2016/Hatch_Tues_PM_Kelt_Steelhead_PSMFC_2016.pdf

One year on our creeks we had huge Carpenter Ant emergence. The wild steelhead kelts (especially females) were plugged with them and in really nice shape. We had some pretty bright ones whose bellies were rather tight. Further, we passed downstream almost every female that had gone up. Some were close to dead and really fungused while others were pretty clean.

Often thought that fishing a big black ant, dry, in late May on a steelhead river just might be a kick.

It's almost like you had a flashback to the Wenatchee River in the early 80s

A black ant in the surface film was actually quite productive...but those were summer runs, of course.

Fish on...

Todd

I was working with winters, but the females really gorged post spawning.

I wonder if, pre all the development and logging, if there weren't big spring bug emergences like ants and termites that helped feed the kelts.

I remember some study done on a remote stream in Russia I think that didn’t have any fishing pressure. I think something like 30% of the females were repeat spawners.

Males were much lower as females dump their eggs and head back out while males will hang around and try to spawn multiple females so have much higher mortality.

For sure.

I hope that, unlike with the Snider Creek program, WDFW actually monitors the success of this program with respect to number of broodstock captured, number of eggs derived, egg to fry success, fry to smolt success, and most importantly, smolt to recruit rate. Absent these parameters it will be impossible to know if the program is any improvement over leaving the natural broodstock in the river doing their reproduction . . . naturally.

While producing fish for harvest is a desirable outcome, I'm less enthused if it comes at the expense of simply annually mining wild broodstock from the natural environment and its wild steelhead population.

Some of the Kamchatkan streams have 90% repeats and many Alaskan streams are above 50%, with most being female.

Just given the situation in Kamchatka (really cold water) I would expect old smolts. As I have noted before, I have never seen a wild run in WA/OR/CA where the first time spawners had an R/S that averaged 1.0; they were all lower. The Keogh study showed that as smolts got older, the river produced fewer, exacerbating the R/S issue. Repeats are mandatory for wild steelhead, unless you can find a system where almost all the smolts are age-1. And, as noted above, most of the repeats are females.

I couldn't agree more.

This has always been my problem with broodstock programs, as well...if there was documented proof that they resulted in more wild fish, or even a no net loss to wild fish while adding harvestable wild-ish hatchery fish to the mix, I'd be all over it.

Mostly what I hear from the proponents, however, is anecdotal and focused on the quality of the hatchery fish they get to harvest.

If all we are doing is removing wild fish from the gene pool, making hatchery fish out of them, and harvesting them, then we may as well just harvest the wild fish, that program costs zero dollars.

Or...don't.

Fish on...

Todd