Did you know that Olympic Peninsula steelhead have two less chromosones then Puget Sound steelhead???...I guess you learn something new everynight!!

Great talk given by Jennifer of the UW SOF with some very intriguing data that should be very powerful when it is all published!!

Plus you gotta love a young attractive blonde that knows more about steelhead then most of us. :p

Sparkey, I suggest that you ask Jennifer for a private seminar on mitosis and meiosis. Maybe you could ask to take her fishing to see the fish spawn. Sounds like you would believe anything this young attrative blonde lady has to say.

Hey its actually the truth!!....easily proven...have a paper on the way that goes into detail that was published by a geneticist.

Actually I was fairly surprised when I heard it...and am dying to get the full scoop!

<img border="0" alt="[eat]" title="" src="graemlins/eat.gif" />

YOU HAVE MY BLESSING SPARKEY!

Jennifer spoke at the Wild Steelhead Coalition meeting last night and gave an excellent talk about her study about hatchery and wild steelhead spawning sucess[or lack of] in Forks Creek, a trib of the Willipa. She is using some ground breaking genetic testing techniques where she can tell which out going smolts came from which incoming parents.And, yes, she is very attractive and bright. Oh ya, and married!!

I wasn't there, and I haven't looked through a microscope at the fish in question, but this seems suspect to me. It contradicts everything I learned about genetics in biology class. However, that was some time back, well before the advent of electricity and indoor plumbing, and Mendel was teaching.

If the peninsula fish have a different number of chromosomes, then it seems like they wouldn't be able to breed with the puget sound fish. If that is true, then, by definition, they would be a different species, wouldn't they? That would mean that one group or the other aren't steelhead.

Fascinating fact, if true.

If she is as attractive as Jerry sez, are you absolutely sure that you heard what she said correctly?

Jennifer who? What's her last name?

i'm short a couple of chromosomes & that hasn't stopped me from bleeding

All this time I thought it was just the homo sapiens from the pen that were a few short. Go figure J/K

Ouch! Anyone see that one coming? Haha

Parker, It's Jennifer McLean. Check out the WSC website, under Dec. speaker, it gives more detail on who she is.

I saw a few of those chromosome short fisherman down at Blue Creek. Squinty eye's, kind of close together, one or more front teeth missing, spitting. Humming durdurdurdeerda ...

That Puget Sound and OP steelhead have different numbers of chromosome pairs was news to me too, but there were 3 or 4 people in attendance that knew this. Two of those people are geneticists, and according to them it is not uncommon for geographically isolated members of the same species to have different numbers of chromosome pairs. The genetics experts said that OP and Puget Sound stocks can interbreed.
But that wasn't the point of Jennifer McLean's presentation. The big news was that, FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME, someone is actually studying what happens when you open a steelhead hatchery on a stream with wild fish. WDFW opened Forks Creek hatchery (trib to the Willapa River) in the early 1990s, planted their first smolts in 1994, and started getting adult returns in 1996. In 1996, they put 90 hatchery hens (and about that many hatchery bucks) above the weir, and counted 11 wild hens (not sure how many bucks) going past the weir. From these spawners, Jennifer and her coworkers are using DNA fingerprinting to keep track of smolts per spawner (freshwater production) and recruits per spawner (total production) for both hatchery and wild fish. The weir allows them to sample all the fish (they clip a small piece off the tail of smolts and adults), and the DNA analysis allows them to determine each fish's family tree.
For the 1996 spawners, the wild hens produced an average of 3.6 adults in the next generation; the hatchery hens produced 0.4 adults per hen. For the 1997 spawners, each hatchery hen produced 0.2 adults on average, each wild hen produced 6.9 adults in the next generation (2001 returns). The bottom line seems to be that first generation hatchery fish are very ill-suited to reproduce in the wild, at least in Forks creek. What would be great to know is what happens in subsequent generations. Because natural spawners in that system typically have a 4 year lifecycle, the 2nd generation of hatchery origin spawners (from 1996 grandparents) aren't due to return until 2004.
Most of this work is not yet published, but it will be in the peer-reviewed Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences sometime soon.
It's hard to believe that this kind of research hasn't been done before. It cannot really be replicated in Washington state now that virtually every river has been planted with hatchery fish for decades.

"For the 1996 spawners, the wild hens produced an average of 3.6 adults in the next generation; the hatchery hens produced 0.4 adults per hen. For the 1997 spawners, each hatchery hen produced 0.2 adults on average, each wild hen produced 6.9 adults in the next generation (2001 returns). "

That is fascinating! Where and when can this research paper be read? If this research holds and translates to other systems, seems like hatcheries are on their way out. Shut all the hatcheries down and allow only catch and release for 10-20 years and we may be way ahead. Would be a tough first 10 years though.....

do you know where the hachery stock used originated from? was it forks creek?

bogachiel x chamber's creek i guess....

Thats the mix bodysurf!

didn't know that

ET, I doubt that this research would lead to closing all hatcheries, even if the results are generally the same for other streams. But it should prompt us to take a hard look at "outplanting" hatchery fish into streams where they aren't being recovered as adults (pretty much all streams without a hatchery and/or weir). Allowing these fish to spawn in the wild could be very detrimental to the wild spawners, through competition for spawning and rearing habitat and/or inbreeding with the wild spawners.

When this research is published I'll post the reference on this board.