Sandy River law suit update

steelhead_stalkers said:
Everyone knows every river in Oregon can sustain much larger returns than they are getting now!
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Not without habitat restoration they can't.
 
steelhead_stalkers said:
I hope everyone realized if they remove all hatchery fish from any or all watersheds that there will be no angling for any species. The Umpqua for example, if all hatchery fish are removed that will end the sport fishery for everyone, fly anglers included. I don't think people realize this. There will be no catch and release for native fish as there should not be if they are so threatened. And if any of the Washington rivers who have removed hatchery fish decades ago are any indication of how well wild fish will thrive without hatchery fish the runs will not get better and fishing will never open back up. Until dams are removed, seals, birds and other predators are kept in check along with other major issues wild runs will never rebound. Hatchery fish are a very small issue in the whole picture. A lot of these rivers the wild fish are not wild at all considering most runs were wiped out with canneries and dams many years ago! The Sandy is a good example of this.
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Not to worry the ruling did not close the hatchery. It's more about cleaning up how they went about doing certain thing and justifications.
 
One thing that always amazes me about the Sandy is water quality. They no longer build dams to run logges down the river as they did years ago. Mining for gravel does not occure anymore. One of the main tributaries the Salmon has the coldest clear water around. The main Sandy comes off the west face of Mt Hood and the area is loaded with ash from past volcanic activity. I grew up around this river and during the summer we would head down there and swim. I still do at Dodge Park and the Garbage hole. Sometimes that river would be thick with glacial till. The river is a milk gray color. Then in January and even in Frebruary I'll drift the river and from Oxbow all the way down to Lewis and Clark the river is a mixture of water and suspended sand. I just have to wonder how those fish survive with all that suspended abrasive stuff floating around. That has to play heck on their gills. I know I avoid fishing an area with a sandy bottom just for that reason. Any ideas, this is a serious question not a dig on water quality.
 
Modest_Man said:
Not without habitat restoration they can't.
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Even rivers with poor habitat can handle more fish than they get now. The runs now are extremely poor even for rivers with a loss of habitat. Almost all of the coastal rivers in Oregon have fairly good habitat and can sustain much larger runs of Chinook and steelhead than they currently receive. Other systems probably need some help but there are a ton that have great habitat.

On a side note. Its funny how fish and game for years has been saying all of the hatchery rivers in Oregon are getting as many planted fish as they can handle. Now with the new proposal all of the sudden all of these systems they choose can sustain more hatchery fish? What a joke.
 
steelhead_stalkers said:
Even rivers with poor habitat can handle more fish than they get now. The runs now are extremely poor even for rivers with a loss of habitat. Almost all of the coastal rivers in Oregon have fairly good habitat and can sustain much larger runs of Chinook and steelhead than they currently receive. Other systems probably need some help but there are a ton that have great habitat.
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What rivers have great habitat? If good habitat is available there would be much better returns. The coastal rivers have seen splash dams, intensive logging, loss of large wood, channel complexity loss, increased water temperatures, siltification, gravel scouring, land slides, etc. And these are our rivers that are in "good" shape!
 
If hatchery operations were to be halted, does anyone think that the Sandy would be the only river, or just the first of many to be taken from fisherman. Once a fishery is closed due to the ESA will it ever reopen? If so by how many more lawsuits?
 
Is their really any such thing a wild fish left out there? The first couple of years after marmot dam was built the Sandy river between the dam and Bull run river dried up because they diverted all the water down the flume. No fish every made it past the bull run river. When they finely started letting water back down that section the fish counts at the dam were ZERO for several years. Until they started releasing hatchery fish on the upper section. At some point there is some kind of hatchery genes in these so called wild fish.
 
Yes, there are hundreds of unpolluted native populations, this hatchery polluted mind set drives me insane, in the beginning all fish were wild, then hatchery fish were created .. From natives, if a native spawns with a hatchery fish.. And then those offspring spawn with a wild fish... Bam .. You have wild fish. Every unhindered coastal waterway has populations of wild fish, many of those rivers have NEVER been exposed to hatchery fish. True pure wild steelhead probably out umber hatchery fish. 2 to 1, and why in the world does it take 1 spawning to turn wild fish into a hatchery fish... But takes one hundred trillion years to take that same fish back to wild status after it spawns with a wild fish. All insane fuching idiots pounding the drum of ignorance.
 
halibuthitman said:
... why in the world does it take 1 spawning to turn wild fish into a hatchery fish... But takes one hundred trillion years to take that same fish back to wild status after it spawns with a wild fish. All insane fuching idiots pounding the drum of ignorance.
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Yes, a good question.

I saw a forum post with dire warning about how DNA is different in one spawning. Holy S#17, really?! The DNA is different in one generation...you mean how like my DNA is different than my parents, and my sister and everyone else and that's kinda like how DNA testing helps solve crimes and such because it's ALWAYS different?
 
You are supposed to introduce new dna... Otherwise all the steelhead would start growing red hair like Ireland and Greenland.. Red haired chromers with a temper.. And too drunk to find the way back to the river-
 
Single biggest hatchery fish issue is the loss of genetic diversity that hedges against natural disasters (and human caused disasters). With the introduction of cookie cutter hatchery strains alternate life history strategies have disappeared. It's going to take more than 15 years (7 generations) for that depressed genetic diversity to make a comeback. Can it come back? Sure. Not going to happen overnight though. It took several million years to produce it, and humans (almost) destroyed it in 130.

If you guys are seriously interested check out books by Jim Lichatowich (Salmon Without Rivers and Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist's Search for Salmon Recovery) or David Montgomery's King of Fish. (They're all depressing but Montgomery's is more depressing).
 
halibuthitman said:
You are supposed to introduce new dna... Otherwise all the steelhead would start growing red hair like Ireland and Greenland.. Red haired chromers with a temper.. And too drunk to find the way back to the river-
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I'm shocked that you did't know that DNA actually stand for don't neglect alcohol. And as for the Irish "An Irishman is not concidered drunk as long as he can hold onto a blade of grass and not fall off the edge of the earth!" Don't know about those folks from Iceland though.;)
 
Modest_Man said:
Single biggest hatchery fish issue is the loss of genetic diversity that hedges against natural disasters (and human caused disasters). With the introduction of cookie cutter hatchery strains alternate life history strategies have disappeared. It's going to take more than 15 years (7 generations) for that depressed genetic diversity to make a comeback. Can it come back? Sure. Not going to happen overnight though. It took several million years to produce it, and humans (almost) destroyed it in 130.

If you guys are seriously interested check out books by Jim Lichatowich (Salmon Without Rivers and Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist's Search for Salmon Recovery) or David Montgomery's King of Fish. (They're all depressing but Montgomery's is more depressing).
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I have been thinking on this issue for a while now so here goes:

first, it seems there are methods to mitigate potential harm to wild fish when planting the hatchery smolts, these methods are not free and require planning, but it seems we can get in lots of hatchery smolts by using multiple locations, spreading out the plantings over time also, basically avoid ever overloading the system with too many hatchery fish so as to avoid having them over compete the wild fish for available food.

now to the genetics- if the fish being planted in a system are born from wild fish returning to that system, I need help to understand the problem.

Let me use the Siuslaw program as an example- returning wild winter steelhead adults are trapped each year and only wild fish are used to generate the hatchery smolt that get planted back into the Siuslaw. So the smolt being planted all come from parents that were born wild and were returning to the Siuslaw to spawn.

Now we need to assume that some hatchery fish will get into the spawning festivities but remember that their parents were fish born wild in the system. So genetically, they are wild fish with just one hatchery/fin-clip/planting cycle..

..so the fish spawning in the river each year could be a mixture of mostly wild born fish and a few hatchery born fish but genetically they are all Siuslaw steelhead, essentially no genetic difference between 'high fin' and 'clipped' because the hatchery born fish are the direct offspring of wild born Siuslaw fish? I mean, the term 'cookie cutter hatchery strain' just doesn't seem to apply if the clipped fish are first born from wild fish.

did I miss something in the science or is 'cookie cutter' just code for 'cheap'?

cheers, roger
 
There are multiple life history strategies PER river. You've got early returning fish, late returning fish, fish that return after one year, fish that return after two years, fish that return after three years, juveniles that utilize side channel habitat, juveniles that utilize the mainstem, juveniles that head to the ocean early, juveniles that head to the ocean after a year, etc. (There was a study that found 17 different spring chinook life history strategies in ONE river.) This is a bet hedger for survival of the population, because it allows for disasters to wipe out some life histories while preserving the population. Most of the steelhead in our rivers have become homogenized.

Spawning fish in a hatchery (even from wild broodstock) select for one type of fish - a fish that survives and does well in a hatchery. Mixing out of basin stocks is worse than using wild brood stock, but it still leads to mass production in a factory of a generic product.
 
Modest_Man said:
There are multiple life history strategies PER river. You've got early returning fish, late returning fish, fish that return after one year, fish that return after two years, fish that return after three years, juveniles that utilize side channel habitat, juveniles that utilize the mainstem, juveniles that head to the ocean early, juveniles that head to the ocean after a year, etc. (There was a study that found 17 different spring chinook life history strategies in ONE river.) This is a bet hedger for survival of the population, because it allows for disasters to wipe out some life histories while preserving the population. Most of the steelhead in our rivers have become homogenized.
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excellent, that makes a lot of sense, long and complex river water systems have runs that are not 'monochromatic'; the micro-variety in behavior and genetics helps protect the run over the long-term.

my example of a short coastal river sounds like the least complex situation, with perhaps just some timing and maturity variables in the winter steelhead run. These you could perhaps account for in your hatchery program by trapping each year some early, middle, and late returning fish, and using a mixture of sizes (1year, 2year, 3year fish...), this can work to supplement wild fish in a 'simple' river like the Siuslaw but you just could not extend this to a much more complex river system....

thanks, roger
 
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