“Steelhead turned out by hatcheries quickly evolve into a kind of swimming livestock with a poor chance of surviving in the wild and may carry their inferior traits into wild populations that biologists are trying to save, a new study of fish in Oregon’s Hood River has found.”
Read the rest of the story: Hatchery fish found to be poor at survival. A study indicates steelhead are so bad at surviving that they are little help to wild runs. By Michael Milstein. The Oregonian.
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Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University with specialties in natural resource politics, public opinion, interest groups, political parties, voting and elections. Aside from academic publications, he is author or co-author of three hiking/backpacking guides, and he is past President of the Western Watersheds Project.
This is hardly a surprise. Even with this research nothing will really change for Idaho unless there is a drastic change of values which I find unlikely. It has long been known that hatchery fish are vastly inferior to wild fish and, with steelhead in the upper Salmon, vastly outnumber the wild fish. I assume that it would be very difficult to find a place where wild fish would not breed with hatchery fish because the numbers are so skewed towards hatchery fish that swim up every tributary where wild fish would spawn. I think that the idea that there are any truly wild steelhead, meaning no hatchery influence at any point, in the upper Salmon drainage to be rather far fetched.