One of the interesting aspects pop steelhead bilology is that both hatchery and wild fish seem to return based on smolt age. The age-1 smolts return earlier than age-2 which return earlier than age-3. This appears even in the F1 generation of wild fish taken into the hatchery and released as 1s.

Because WDG needed to get fish to size in one year they further selected the earliest maturing fish. This also pushed return times earlier.

Want more early-returning hatchery fish? Significantly increase in stream productivity. Most easily accomplished by increasing salmon escapement but has also worked in the outfall stream from a sewage treatment plant in Idaho.

Hmm -2

Speaking of the Green. Lotsa Pinks again, good numbers of Coho, and two nice returns of Chum, so far this season. We’ll see how many of the huge Striped Dog Toothers make it up here with this next water rise.

Should be lotsa sand, gravel, Coho, and Pink redds torn up as they modify the riverbed to spawn.

Bomb Craters...

Found this in a 2015 NOAA report:

"Beginning in 1935, steelhead returning to Chambers Creek were used to establish a hatchery stock that was subsequently released throughout much of western Washington and the Lower Columbia River (Crawford 1979)"

With regards to the idea that there were "lots" of pinks, or any other salmon, one needs to look at the density pf biomass and not simple numbers.

Those working in the ecological interactions of spawning use use kg/ square metre of stream measures at summer low flow. Take a stream that 10km long and 10m wide. That's about six miles long and 35 feet wide. This gives an area of 100,000 sqm. The infection point of loading is about 2 kg/sq m which is 200,000 kg. at 2 kg wt for pinks that lives 100,000. You can figure what the other species would result in. Streams in Idaho have successfully absorbed 8 kg over the course of a year.

Many studies have shown measurable benefits at about 0.6, based on spawning in the whole anadromous zone.

Our streams are starving.

If you recall I really pissed off a Deputy Director and several other senior staff when I called our watersheds aquatic deserts. They really did not want to put those Carcasses in the streams. CM do you remember the average salmon carcass biomass for the Chehalis Basin before the settlers arrived that you did the math on for us ?

Yeah. I have done that exercise on a few systems for sh*ts and giggles. I recall the Chehalis watershed numbers. As I recall, chums were six million. Sounds good to me.

I have talked with some WDFW bios who think a lot of fish, in part of the stream, is sufficient to get benefits.

The old WDG brought in some broodstock early on from the Green River, but the Chambers Creek hatchery steelhead program relied over-whelmingly on endemic Chambers Creek fish over its life. Any blood lines from outside stocks became very diluted very rapidly.

Pautzke's Pets is what Chambers Creek hatchery steelhead were often called. This is because the Chambers Creek hatchery steelhead program was started by Clarence Pautzke and Jim Meigs, who worked for the old WDG.