Hoorah for Hatchery Fish

[Tony Buzolich]

I just thought I'd throw this bone out there for everyone to argue over. And, I'm probably going to speak out of both sides of my mouth, just for the fun of discussion.

With all the crap that's been going on about water robbery, tunnels, tearing down dams, building new dams, saving the delta, etc. how can we ever complain about having too many "hatchery" fish in our rivers?

The world is changing faster than I like. And as I get older it seems to change even faster. I guess being old lets you remember how the good old days used to be and how good things were when you were a kid growing up. Maybe we didn't appreciate it as much then, but I'd sure like to have some of it back now.

There's been a lot of chatter about saving the salmon and steelhead in our rivers and I whole heartedly support this. But how is the best way to do it? Is tearing down dams going to help increase the population growth of these fish at the expense of human water supply? Sure, I'd like to think we could return to the way things used to be, but things aren't like they used to be. We've got an unbelievable change in our population growth. And we all drink water.

A few years back (maybe 15-20?) the Feather and the American rivers were full of salmon. I was guiding salmon then on foot and we had some fantastic fishing days for several years. The hatchery in Oroville was over max capacity for handling all the salmon that were coming back to spawn. I know this because I had a little brother driving a rendering truck hauling the overage away. He was hauling spawned and unspawned carcuses away by the tons. Drums and drums of eggs included. The hatchery just couldn't handle any more. And, the fishing in the rivers was good. Everybody was catching lots of fish. Hatchery reared fish.

So, along the way comes some do gooder saying that these are mostly "hatchery" fish and they're NOT good for the system. " Hatchery fish are weaker". "We need to rebuild our native run and naturally spawned fish". "We need to let them return to their natural spawning grounds hundreds of miles farther upstream". ?????? Wouldn't that be nice?

Well, here we are. Trying to support a good idea. Trying to make things the way they were a hundred years ago. Wishful thinking but not very realistic. Our world today is not like it was a HUNDRED years ago. We've grown leaps and bounds and we're running out of room,,,,,,,,, and water.

Hatcheries were built with the idea of increasing the supply of fish to an ever increasing population of people. And it works. And we all catch fish. Native naturally spawned fish? No. But at least we have fish. And most people are happy.

My point with this editorial is only an old man's rambling thinking about how things used to be. Our world is not the way it used to be and we need the technology that hatcheries have brought us to at least get some fish back into our rivers. We can't turn back time and fish those untouched streams of a hundred years ago,,,,,,,,, there aren't any.
Tony

[the_gnarwhale]

Sweet blog. Manifest Destiny isn't cool anymore. Biodiversity is good for everything in the long run. Including humans. Sacrificing that so you can catch a few more fish in the short term is near sighted and bad for future generations.

[Rich Morrison]

I like your style Tony. I remember those school trips to the Oroville hatchery back in the late 70's and early 80's and the ridiculous numbers of Salmon we saw. It's probably been posted here before, but the book An Entirely Synthetic Fish by Anders Halverson is a great book on the history of hatchery trout. There is some good discussion about the original strain of McCloud Rainbows from a hatchery that is now under Lake Shasta. There's a dam not going anywhere any time soon. It's a very interesting subject - thanks for a good post on it.
Rich

[Ralph]

Tony, I'll keep this to one river that happens to be in your back yard, the Yuba. How, in any way, shape or form would giving fish passage through Englebrite and allowing them another 40+ miles of river to spawn negatively affect you? Englebright does not provide flood control or water delivery storage, and the small amount of hydropower it provides could be achieved with a run of the river system. The only reason the dam exists in it's current state is lack of will by the powers that be.

There are HUNDREDS of dams here in the west that have outlived their usefulness and block fish passage (among other things). Removing key dams would strongly reduce our dependence on hatcheries. Hatcheries are NOT self sustaining. Look at the other river in your backyard, the Sac and what happened at the Coleman hatchery. Only a few (I think 3) generations of in-breeding steelhead stocks was enough to breed out the instinct to go to sea. The fish were released and they simply milled about in the river. This was only corrected by bringing in WILD steelhead to cross their genetics with the hatchery fish so they could figure out how to make basic survival decisions. The hatcheries require wild, genetically intact fish to survive. You can have your hatcheries, but you better figure out how to have enough wild, native fish to keep your pipe dream alive.

[wineslob]

How many fisheries do we enjoy that are completely artificial?

I can think of a few right off the top of my head.

[donkeyhunter007]

biodiversity is crucial for the health of the planet.......... maintaining the gene pool of salmonids is crucial to avoid mass die off of fish.....fish come back at varying times to also help against drought taking out the whole run...... I have a theory about adipose clipped fish being detrimental to wild fish...... as far as water for everyone heres are a couple ideas... off stream water storage filled with excess winter flow.....water catchment systems on all new construction..... If there is ONE thing on this planet that should be illegal to profit off is water...we all need it to live. Wars have been and will be fought in the future over water get ready. We may have to invade CANADA if we get thirsty enough.

[ycflyfisher]

Tony,

This seems to me like just another one of your rants, where you attempt to impose your opinions on everyone else, so I’m not going to waste time on any of your individual “talking points”.

I will however state that it’s this very common myth that hatcheries “are working” that is the pipe dream concept of reality and not what you're implying. And that it’s that shared, common perception that hatcheries "are working" that creates the massive public pressure that keeps the fisheries professionals from implementing more sensible and sustainable management practices in regards to artificial propagation. Adaptive Management should be allowed to be well…adaptive, and it hasn’t been in regards to hatchery production.

The reality is that artificial propagation has not only failed miserably and will continue to fail miserably, but that hatchery products have and DO imperil self-sustaining populations not only via genetic introgression but also via intraspecies competition and by other means. And if you wanted to read the mountains of science that says so, you would have done so by now. That’s been provided on this forum numerous times.

There’s literally nothing that mankind could have possibly created to insure that factors that shape density dependent survival will ALWAYS work against self-sustaining populations of salmonids than hatchery salmonids.

It isn’t and shouldn’t be about what’s best for fisherman and guides like yourself who are happy with severely truncated, degraded rivers that are occasionally, but inconsistently full of fake, hatchery fish. It’s about what’s best for the sustainable survivability of species and DPSs that have been imperiled.

Tell you what Tony, if you’re really interested in educating yourself buy and read Jim Lichatowich’s two books:

Salmon Without Rivers- A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis
Salmon, People & Place- A Biologist’s Search For Salmon Recovery

There’s no way anyone who reads Jim’s first book can possibly come away thinking hatcheries have been a successful solution.

Read the second and you’ll understand completely why some of us think they’re part of the problem.

[ycflyfisher]

Look at the other river in your backyard, the Sac and what happened at the Coleman hatchery. Only a few (I think 3) generations of in-breeding steelhead stocks was enough to breed out the instinct to go to sea. The fish were released and they simply milled about in the river. This was only corrected by bringing in WILD steelhead to cross their genetics with the hatchery fish so they could figure out how to make basic survival decisions. The hatcheries require wild, genetically intact fish to survive. You can have your hatcheries, but you better figure out how to have enough wild, native fish to keep your pipe dream alive.

That really isn’t true.

The truth is that anadromy is largely accepted scientifically as a survival response on the part of Pacific salmonids to increase their respective abundance in what were fairly harsh in-river environs long before humans began altering rivers. Before human alteration, Pacific rivers were still plagued with issues like thermal conditions during the summer that were far from fish friendly, intense inter- and intra- species competition for limited food resources at every life stage, and for the most favorable in-river habitat (both in terms of avoiding predation and environmental factors). Pacific salmonids adapted to those harsh in-river conditions by becoming anadromous where they could exploit the much more limitless Pacific for explosive growth, increased recruitment at spawning, with the added benefit of not being dependent on their inland habitat for years at a time over multiple age classes which allowed them to bridge long periods of adverse inland conditions.

Since anadromy was the survival strategy that allowed Pacific salmonids to increase their abundance, anadromous life histories became the most common. There were still completely riverine components in populations of Pacific salmonids (O. Mykiss in particular) and there still are, but those are USUALLY small components and are considered to be some of the deviant LHs that any healthy population of adaptable O. Mykiss and to a lesser extent other Pacific salmonids will express. All healthy populations of Pacific salmonids will express numerous LH’s that deviate from the “norm” and it’s those deviant LHs that allow them to adapt and sustain population abundance under changing or deleterious environmental conditions.

Dams are a bad thing because they truncate rivers and on severely truncated rivers like the Feather, American, Russian, etc, there’s only a small portion of the main stems left for the salmonids to exploit, and that limited habitat also tends to become degraded by factors like channelization from controlled flows and sediment transport with zero gravel replenishment.

However, some dams like the dams on the upper portion of the lower Sac and the Yuba (where there’s huge beds of mining tailings providing constant gravel recruitment) have made the habitat that remains much more fish friendly than it ever has been. The dams on the Sac and the Yuba both created year round fish friendly thermal regimes, both have huge inventories of abundant aquatic inverts (where rivers like the Lower Feather and American are limited to basically a few species of mays and caddis largely because of substrate issues), and huge egg drops and corresponding huge winter YOY emergence from the still predominately anadromous Chinooks.

In other words, human intervention has made the habitat left on the lower Sac and Yuba much more fish friendly, damn near aquarium-like, than it ever was prior to human intervention. The self-sustaining populations of steelhead (which are nothing more than O. Mykiss with anadromous LHs) in those two rivers did what any healthy population of predominantly anadramous O. Mykiss would do when environmental conditions shift the favorable conditions from the salt to their inland environs: They residualized and stayed in the river and the small percentage of non-hatchery O. Mykiss that are still expressing anadromous lifehistories as a survival strategy, became the deviants. The Coleman facility had nothing to do with it. It’s actually a dynamic shift you’d predict any predominately anadromous O. Mykiss population to undergo if inland conditions become not just favorable, but ideal, like they have in the Sac and the Yuba.

PS- Thanks Frank for your contribution. You're awesome dude!

[Ralph]

In a nutshell, what you are saying is that anadromous fishes are adapting to hatchery conditions and that is how things should be. Anadromy is no longer necessary. Good on you and go to hell.

[ycflyfisher]

In a nutshell, what you are saying is that anadromous fishes are adapting to hatchery conditions and that is how things should be. Anadromy is no longer necessary. Good on you and go to hell.

No Ralph, in a nutshell, what I'm saying is exactly what I said: The once predominantly anadromous O. Mykiss of the lower Sac and the Yuba adapted to more favorable inriver conditions (not hatchery conditions) by becoming predominantly riverine (non-anadromous).

Now if you don't agree with that, please take the time to explain to everyone why it is that you think that both the lower Sac and Yuba have abundant, wild populations of resident bows, but virtually no wild steelhead.