Originally Posted by
Mark Kranhold
Heard from a very reliable resource that the hatchery is releasing the smolts way to early, another hatchery screwup! These fish should be released in April not February. The smolts aren’t even done with the smolting phase and are not programmed yet that the American River is their birthing place. So now these released smolts are either getting lost in the system, or getting diseased such as Ich (Ichthyophthirius multifiliis) and dying or turning into striper bait.
To call it a hatchery screwup is totally incorrect. I can't speak directly for the American, but these decisions are likely due to recommendations by groups like the HSRG who want to limit the impacts of hatchery fish on wild stocks while still producing enough fish for all the stakeholders. You can't just dump millions of smolts in the river at the same time and not expect them to impact one another. I'd rather have fish released in February when turbidity is up and temperatures are down than release them in May or June. Diseases like ich are directly tied to high water temperatures so releasing in February would actually reduce disease risk. While decreased turbidity reduces predation. Increased straying is definitely a possibility, but those fish would still be entering the ocean fishery and some of those would still be returning to the hatchery. Again, without knowing the American specifically, my hunch is that survival for smolts released in February would be higher than them being released in May or June.
Originally Posted by
Rossflyguy
You’re not gonna have wild fish numbers pre dam when rivers have hundreds of miles of spawning ground blocked. Better hatchery practices are needed but if you’re gonna sit there and say these guides don’t know what they’re talking about I seriously doubt you’re on the water as much as they are.
Any reasonable person realizes that we will never have wild fish numbers comparable to pre-dam and hatchery intervention is needed. Incorporating science like the HSRG recommends is attempting to better hatchery practices, that is the whole purpose of the group.
There is no arguing with the guides over numbers of the early 2000s. They were extremely high and it may simply have been an anomaly. If you look at the longer trend, the recent numbers in the Central Valley aren't out of the ordinary of what was observed in the past. Rather than talking about how we are failing, we should be trying to identify the conditions that led to the boom of the early 2000s. Salmon are a cyclical species so you often see these big boom/bust cycles. I'm not sure that the numbers of the early 2000s are sustainable. It's interesting that we have not seen a similar boom to the early 2000s since the 1950s which is how far escapement estimates go back. In fact, that big boom of 2003 may have been a factor in the near collapse of the fishery in 2007 due to the density dependent factors I spoke of earlier.
Managing Chinook is extremely difficult because they have a life history that spans a very large area in very different environments. In addition you have multiple year classes mixed at any given time which further compounds the difficulty.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Issac Asimov
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