Hatchery Wild CoExist Brood Stock

[SSPey]

Alsea River has had a Broodstock program for years…they post the information.

Most will say… before the broodstock program, they had about a 1% return rate…currently achieving about a 5% return.

However, the number of plants been dwindling downward dramatically due to “eco-peoples’ “ constant pressuring, going against the real science and data.

This is false.

Alsea winter steelhead release numbers are not dwindling … they have increased since the late 1990s, consistent with guidance in the 2014 CMP, which raised smolt releases from 120K to 140K while increasing the proportion of broodstock (see data below).

Also false: smolt to adult survival has not increased from 1 to 5% with incorporation of wild broodstock. It has remained largely unchanged.

And yet … despite the overall increase in releases and the incorporation of a broodstock program, winter steelhead fishing on the Alsea has been pretty poor over the past 10 years. This partly reflects the marked shift from concentrated adult returns Dec-Jan (in the traditional hatchery program) to more temporally spread-out returns Dec-April (mining wild fish genes to do so). Broodstock is not the answer to all woes, it simply creates a new set of problems and whiners.