And now those of us who love the fish, and volunteered at every level, complied with the regulations whether they made sense or not, are left with what? The history of weakening steelhead runs goes back more than ten years!
+1
Simple questions like "What is the carrying capacity of this watershed"
are never addressed. An entire ecosystem is damaged when fish runs decline or disappear.
Similar to my comments re: habitat above, "carrying capacity" only means what someone wants it to mean...
Current carrying capacity? If we include the ocean, Puget Sound, estuary, and the river...well, we're at it, always. Holistically it is literally exactly how many fish we have at this moment.
Carrying capacity in 1855? I'd wager it was a bit higher
Carrying capacity if we did X, Y, or Z, or some or all of them?
Plant 10 billion trees in the watershed, but don't fix the dike-straightened last 5 miles of river before it blasts into the saltwater with no estuary to speak of? I doubt we added much CC with all of those trees.
Go out to the coast, where we have "pristine" habitat...but cold, clear rivers with zero nutrients without a mountain of dead salmon carcasses littering the bottom? There's nothing pristine about that habitat. That habitat sucks for raising fish.
I spent a lot of time throwing hatchery coho off of bridges on small tributaries up on the Skagit, and while it certainly didn't hurt, looking down and seeing a few hundred fish in the river sure didn't look like the tens of thousands littering the bottom and bank when I was a kid.
I agree with Jim, in that we failed to do the right thing a LONG time ago, and we are now reaping the rewards of that failure.
The problem is that anyone who has a "simple" solution is almost always 100% wrong.
"Remember in 1977 when we had so many fish? We should just do what we were doing then!"
Well...what we were doing then is why we are where we are now.
If we want historical levels of fish runs, I think we all know what to do...move 90% of the population somewhere else, remove all of their houses, most of the roads, take out all of the fishing, from Japan to Alaska through BC to here, in Puget Sound and all of the rivers, and wait for the forests to grow back and the fish to grow back.
Outside of doing that, it's going to be all techno-fixes, and we have a long long long history of failing at those.
Other option is that we have almost no fish, and no fishing at all. That sure as hell doesn't satisfy me, or anyone else, I think.
If we want steelhead, we need salmon, lots of them, and lots of spawning and rearing habitat for steelhead young.
If we want salmon, they need forage fish to eat.
If we want salmon, we need to have a lot more than half of them get past the SEAK/WCVI fisheries, commercial, guided, and recreational.
If we want salmon, we need much larger pieces of healthy rivers full of spawning and rearing habitat than we have now.
We need cleaner water, more trees along and in the rivers, and healthy and productive side channels, beaver ponds, and unpolluted functioning estuaries.
Every one of those things are essential, doing all of them but one...any one...and it won't work.
Our society will continue to attempt to "save" salmon by doing exactly zero of those things, and we will get the salmon...and steelhead...runs that you would expect.
My optimism level is not very high.
Fish on...
Todd