Anyone notice a bunch of Canadian sponsors on that list… guess no fishing is US is good business for Canadian lodges and charters.

I read the notice linked to on the WFC site. It only takes a little research or discussion with current or former WDFW employees to see that there is a history of complex anadromous fish recovery plans that have taken a long time to complete.

In a world where a woman can successfully sue for putting her RV on cruise control on the freeway, and then leave the drivers seat to make a sandwich, I guess anything is possible.

I think they might lose because I don't think NMFS is technically breaking any law. They're just driving slow in the fast lane, but the trip is still being made.

If WFC loses, would it be possible to sue them for diverting our government employees time and efforts from developing a recovery plan in order to defend themselves from a meritless suit?

Any lawyers on the forum?

I would like to think You're wrong....but I know better. I've achieved pretty much everything I'd hoped for when it comes to Steelhead fishing....not every one can be as lucky as the "Chosen one".

Not a lawyer but I have an observation that is really not new but maybe needs to be restated here.

Where laws and regulations have been enacted that require some form of review and approval by a Government agency those same laws and regs need to include maximum time frames for those agencies to perform their review process and (1) deny the request for cause, (2) extend for a specific period to allow for necessary modification of the initial request or (3) issue the "permit."

Failure on the part of the Government to act timely should allow the permit requester to move forward. The burden should be on the Government to perform timely rather than the requester to sit on their hands while the Government agency dithers (seemingly) forever.

Salmo G. / Smalma - Do we have any escapement numbers for the Snohomish basin prior to hatchery supplementation? It sounds like hatchery operations for steelhead began in the early 1900s. Why would they have started supplementing if there were large stocks of wild fish?

The point I am getting to - we know in the Snohomish basin we have a couple of wild summer run stocks. Each of these is comprised of just a few hundred returning fish. They appear to be quite stable populations.

What is to say that without hatchery influence the stable population of the wild winters isn't but a couple thousand?

Looking over data from the 70s and 80s it appears that the years there were large catches of wild fish coincides with the years of large hatchery plants (unclipped fish? ).

Would this necessarily apply to a 'plan'? I don't see where the "review and approval by a Government agency" would apply to putting together a plan which in itself is only a recommendation for people to follow.

I don't the the plans are recommendations. If a plan was in place, WFC would certainly sue and probably win if it wasn't followed.

Still, it will probably be cheaper to be risk being sued and lose than actually implement actions that cost money.

Supcoop,

I don't think there are any useful escapement numbers for the Snohomish or elsewhere that pre-date hatchery supplementation. The earliest in the Snohomish are probably the trap-and-haul records from Sunset Falls on the SF Sky.

Why steelhead supplementation began is an interesting question. Salmon fish culturists had learned in the 1930s and 40s that juvenile salmon needed to be reared and not released as unfed fry in order to produce any meaningful adult return. Early culturists had also tried producing steelhead by releasing unfed fry, but there was no monitoring. And by the early 1940s steelhead managers appear to have concluded that steelhead fry releases were most likely a waste of otherwise good broodstock. It was about that time that WDG's Pautzke and Meigs discovered that they could compress a juvenile steelhead's two-year freshwater rearing life history into one year in the warmer spring water at the south Tacoma trout hatchery near Chambers Creek. The rest, as they say, is history.

Just as hatchery reared trout had made spring time trout fishing viable on numerous lowland lakes that previously had marginal, or even no, fishing, Pautzke expressed the opinion that hatchery steelhead would enhance winter steelhead fishing, making the passtime more productive and attract more anglers. In those days, WDG got nearly 100% of its funding from license sales. I suspect that it seemed like a good marketing plan.

By most indicators, steelhead populations were always far less than salmon populations. But even 1940 steelhead runs average quite a bit larger than what we see today, and what seemed like the good runs of the 1980s were less than the runs of the 1940s and perhaps only slightly less than the runs of the 1960s. I have to draw that conclusion inferentially from old catch data, so while credible, it's not supported by extremely strong evidence.

Extant summer and winter populations could be described as stable in a very dynamic way, with wide annual fluctuation, but the official PS status review describes them as declining, and hence, threatened with extinction within 100 years. And harvest is not a proximate factor for decline in the last couple decades, since total harvest of wild PS steelhead is 4% or less. The topic that I think is very much up for debate is whether or not most PS steelhead populations are at the carrying capacity of current habitat conditions. I think they are. If so, then that makes the subject of recovery under the ESA rather troubling. How do you recover a population that is already at the carrying capacity of its habitat? The conventional answer is that you must increase the capacity and or the productivity of the habitat. And just how do we do that with a state population that increases by over 50,000 humans each year?

Regarding the occurrence of large catches of wild steelhead in the same seasons as larger catches of hatchery steelhead doesn't mean unclipped hatchery steelhead were counted as wild fish. It is better explained by the fact that when ocean conditions are good for wild steelhead, they are also good for hatchery steelhead. So the respective runsizes of hatchery and wild steelhead generally do go up and down in unison. We make that observation region wide.

Sg

Salmo, it was Meigs. Think I have a couple of their papers.

To echo the variability that Salmo talks about, I have not seen any data that shows recruit per spawner to first return even averages 1; it is generally .6-.9. Of course, this means repeat spawners are critical. But, the R/S data seem to show some cycles with high years (still only occasionally >1) every 3 or 4. The low years are then buoyed up by the repeats. So steelhead evolved to be highly successful spawners once every few years. Unlike salmon, which have to get it right the one time they spawn.

Which also may explain why steelhead have such a long return and spawn time; the evolutionary expectation is that only a part or two of the annual spawn will be successful. One year the tributaries, one year the mainstem, one year the early spawners, and one year the ones that spawn after the March deluge.

My comments were intended to have a broader coverage than just the plan (think HGMPs/EIS). But to the extent that a "plan" is required and may be a foundation for how other requirements may be reviewed and approved/rejected my comments do apply.

Thank you salmo! "Carrying capacity" was the term I was failing to get at in my post.

so does it also seem acceptable that the larger the watershed the more diverse the population and better able to handle the fluctuations of the environment ? example: Skagit watershed ?

If you only think on a watershed basis. Back when we were marking steelhead (100% of the smolts, 100% of the adults, 100% of the kelts) we got relatively few marked adults back to the trap and NO marked repeat spawners even though we had repeats annually. It appeared that the small-stream steelhead aren't really tied to just that stream. Same observation from BC.

This, at least up until a few years ago, was supported by genetic studies that showed not a whole lot of differentiation among watersheds.

If so, the long term survival of steelhead might be dependent on keeping good numbers in all the streams and not just select a few favorites.

Steelhead will wander to different watersheds. Some believe the wander rate could be up to 20% at times.

skyrise -

It makes sense that the larger basins would more diverse habitat (and fish?) and likely a higher probability that at least some of that habitat would be in decent shape. I do find it interesting that the two Puget Sound east side steelhead populations that arguably are in the basin shape are the Skagit and Samish. The two are polar opposite in terms of basin size.

What the two populations do share is that of the east side populations they have the most direct and shortest paths to the ocean. Have to wonder that their populations are experiencing lower early marine mortalities than the other PS populations.

Curt

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If it weren't for this trait steelhead would not have spread all along the coast of North America. A trait that is often viewed with wonder and praise and held up as part of the diversity of survival instincts inherent in the steelhead population. Right up until it happens to be a Chambers Creek fish doing the straying, then people start losing their freakin' mind!