Backtrollin,
What about hatchery salmon would you like to discuss?
Hatchery salmon are the backbone of WA treaty, non-treaty commercial, and recreational salmon fishing. Without hatchery salmon, recreational salmon fishing in Puget Sound and tributaries would be limited to pinks in odd years and coho every second or third year under recent run strength conditions. No ocean commercial or sport salmon fishing. And the Columbia River would be open only for limited summer/fall chinook fishing and the recently rebounding sockeye run. Coastal rivers would have limited chinook and fairly good coho fishing. I think that's about it.
The negative economic effects would be large. The measurable benefits to the remaining wild salmon runs would be modest at best. Unlike hatchery and wild steelhead that have maintained significant genetic separation over the decades through run timing, salmon haven't. Except for Skagit chinook, wild chinook in PS are little more than a blip on the radar screen, and most other wild PS chinook now are from Green R. hatchery chinook parentage, the native populations mostly having been extirpated. There are fair wild coho populations in N PS, but all of S PS have been functionally extirpated.
The differences between salmon and steelhead populations and management are important in that recovering most of the wild salmon populations will be done from extant hatchery stocks and not from endemic native wild populations.
Sg
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