Do yourself and some Wild Steelhead a favor - kill a hatchery steelhead

There's blood in the water.

A handy guide to killing and grilling hatchery steelhead courtesy of G_Smolt over at Buster Wants to Fish.

Hatch brat body bag, there's three in there.

Hatchery steelhead are tasty!

Stop the proposed hatchery program on the Klickitat

The Klickitat River in southern Washington is among the crowned jewels of the Pacific Northwest. Long revered for its large native steelhead and spring Chinook, the river has some of the most intact habitat for fish and wildlife in the Middle Columbia Region.  It's the home of this recent Slab of the Month.

This is where you come in. Please take 2 minutes to read over the comments here, personalize the letter and send your message to BPA.


Elwha River hatchery to hurt recovery

The media is starting to pay attention to those who think the hatchery plan on the Elwha is misguided.

LINK (Via: The Seattle Times)

A Tribe Opts For Hatcheries to Bring Fish to the Elwha

What a crock of shit.

There are about 600,000 fish in the hatchery – steelhead and coho salmon for now – but Ward wants to see that number increase. 

More Hatchery Insanity

This just in from the Wild Steelhead Coalition.

The Bonneville Power Administration has proposed funding a significant expansion of hatchery facilities on the Klickitat. The programs which alleges to be designed to reduce the impact of non-native fall chinook and coho on ESA listed wild stocks would actually lead to an overall increase in the total number of fish released in the watershed, including continuing to release 4 million fall chinook. Equally disconcerting, they would expand the number of skamania smolt released annually to 130,000 and possibly (likely) initiate a wild broodstock steelhead program with a production goal of 70,000 smolts. They also plan to expand the spring chinook hatchery program by 200,000 smolts taking broodstock from the extremely fragile spring chinook stock. The Yakama Nation's Klickitat Hatchery Complex Program with the free money they get from the BPA is completely out of control with pro-hatchery mania and this proposal could place the future of wild summer steelhead and spring chinook in the basin in serious peril. 

You can read the project proposal here.

All comments and responses to comments will be published in the final EIS. The final EIS will also include any changes to their proposal or analysis. Comments may be submitted online at: http://www.bpa.gov/comment

More to come.

Diminished Reproductive Success of Steelhead from a Hatchery Supplementation Program

From Osprey Steelhead News comes this dispatch regarding a recent study further proving that hatchery fish reduce the health of wild stocks.

A recent study authored by a group of biologists from NOAA and ODFW explores reproductive success of hatchery v. wild steelhead in a tributary of the Imnaha River in Oregon. The "integrated" hatchery program in which hatchery juveniles were progeny of wild parents or parents of relatively recent wild ancestry still showed a dramatic decline in reproductive fitness relative to their hatchery counterparts (30-60%). This research adds to the ever growing body of evidence that hatchery fish are extremely unsuccessful when spawning in the wild and that hatchery spawners dramatically reduce the productivity of wild stocks and further call into question managers ongoing reliance on hatcheries in recovery efforts.

LINK