How is hatchery production being tailored to all the latest headlines?

With the orcas, AK and B.C. fisheries, competition with wild fish (ie timing), are policies changing, and how? With bigger, wild fish being touted as the Orca's best dietary solution, I recalled posts about only taking eggs/milt from the largest fish to genetically hatch bigger fish, but that had some bad implications on wild fish, ecology, and some other scientific nonsense.

I think this topic has been discussed to some length in the past on this site. A quick search could probably yield the information you might be looking for.

What seems to be one of the bigger factors is maximizing growth opportunities for chinook which will yield bigger fish. Ocean fisheries primarily and inland marine fisheries to some extent deprive chinook of growth because harvest occurs before the fish can grow to their full potential.

Of course there are more complex factors that also contribute such as evolving food resources, spawning habitat and conditions, but to me it seems this is well within our control of we would like to control the size of our fish, however the willingness to abandon Alaska/Canada/Ocean fisheries is not there.



Streamer

The large size in Chinook is tied most directly to age at maturity. If you keep killing the immature fish (blackmouth) they never reach their genetically connected age at maturity so you don't get the big fish.

It is also tied to the amount of food in the ocean and if you keep harvesting down the food chain they starve.

Quit ocean fishing until Chinook and SRKWs recover.

Or until you die......and that has the highest probability of occurring first.

Well, yeah. My parents' generation was old enough to have (possibly) known people who actually saw the vast herds and flocks of Passenger Pigeon and Bison. Will out Grandkids be asking us "what were huge salmon runs like?" or "tell us about the Orcas in Puget Sound"

8/17/2022

To many salmon, lets kill more.....grrrrrrr

NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region <wcr.noaafisheries@public.govdelivery.com>

Speaking of Orcas. A few swam by Jeff Head this morning. I was hoping they were seal eating transients not chinook eating residents.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/556i9mdg1u10oj2/IMG_1789.heic?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nxu3lgfn2mfq21t/IMG_1787.heic?dl=0