Hatchery Fish

[drysideshooter]

I have spent a fair amount of time lately talking with some fisheries biologists, one of whom told me about a study of hatchery vs wild fish that was done in Oregon a couple of years ago.

In that study, conducted on Deschutes  River steelhead it was found that about 80% of the fish in the system were hatchery fish, so wild fish comprised about 20%.  Of the total number of fish caught and landed though, wild fish represented about 85%.  At their Alsea facility they also did a study on the offspring of wild parents that were reared at the hatchery using the eggs and sperm from wild parents.  They found those offspring were about 5x more likely to bite than a hatchery fish produced by hatchery reared parents.  It has been known for a long time by biologists that hatchery fish aren't as aggressive and don't bite like wild fish, but this study seems to show just how great the disparity really is. 

Locally in the tricities area I don't think the rate of landed steelhead is quite so disparate, but I don't think it's great either, and it's probably going to get worse as there is no way to avoid a certain amount of dilution of the wild population by interbreeding with hatchery fish.  And something a lot of folks don't know is that only about 5% of hatchery fish actually get fin clipped, so some of the "wild" fish that are being returned are probably not really wild.   A recently retired biologist told me the other day that it's a problem that biologists are well aware of and they are trying to develop procedures to lessen it, but he said he didn't hold out a lot of hope for meaningful results.   That same biologist was fishing above McNary the other day and landed 3 wild steelhead.  I certainly know of several people that have had similar experiences where they catch several wild fish in one day.  Seems to lead me to believe that the wild fish are probably schooling and traveling together, and when there is a school of them the bite is probably better . 

As sad as it seems, without some sort of breakthrough the steelhead and salmon fishing is probably going to decline with no realistic way of bringing back some of the great wild fish DNA from fish like used to spawn in the Clearwater.   I haven't talked with anyone that has had a good chinook or steelhead season this fall.  I talked with a friend yesterday that just returned from the Clearwater and he said he did worse than he has in the last 20 years.  The day after the biologist landed 3 wild fish above McNary my wife and I fished there.  An average of 15 boats throughout the day, some trolling and others using eggs, shrimp and jigs.  We talked with quite a few fisherman.  In several hours there was one keeper caught over by the steep rock bank, and no wild fish caught and released. 

As sportsman I believe we need to write letters and let it be widely known that we expect better results for our license dollars and the tax revenue generated buying gear, boats, etc.  A breakthrough that leads to a meaningful improvement may be more likely if we start making some noise.   

[theleo]

Do you have a proposed solution to better the situation or is it more just about writing a letter saying we are disappointed in what's happening? My problem when this debate comes up is what's happened to a number of tribs on the lower Columbia. Activist groups have gone to court to have once productive fisheries shut down to no ones benefit and no increase in the numbers of wild fish in those rivers. Until dams start coming out and there's a better way to control the harvest of salmon off the coast of Canada the decline will continue. Salmon and steelhead will go up rivers they were never spawned in, so runs and systems can come back. The DNA of the fish may be slightly different than those that were there 100 years ago, but that's nothing some salt and pepper wont fix.

[JimmyHoffa]

I'm assuming that you mean the 80% are in the system below the hatchery traps.  Depending on run time and location, it is supposed to be like that.  Fisheries usually try to select a strain that doesn't overlap with wild.

[Sandberm]

I've never heard this theory of wild fish being more aggressive and thus more likely to strike a hook. Interesting.

My own experience at McNary last fall and winter would back that up though. I probably caught around a dozen fish or so and only one had a clipped fin. All the fish were in the 4 to 6 lb range.

By the way, I never have any consistent luck down there till the water temp gets below 60 degrees which it just did this week. Might explain why you didnt see any fish caught the other day.

[drysideshooter]

I believe the 80% was representative of the total number of fish in the system over a season, not at any one particular time.

The retired biologist said that there may be things that can be done with the way the fish are handled after hatching that could possibly have an affect on their aggressiveness/nature, though he didn't seem overly hopeful that it could be significant.  I would certainly be willing to pay higher license fees if it meant money going to research to decide if there was something that could be done, whether it's hatchery practices or other measures. 

The other day the water temperature at McNary was around 59.7, though it obviously hadn't been below the magical 60 number for long, and wasn't under by much.  Though I know 60 is the widely used number, obviously there will be variance from year to year and it won't magically turn on at 60.  Hopefully as the water continues to cool the bite will improve. With the limit being cut down to only one fish it would be nice to at least have a somewhat positive expectation.  1 out of 12 being a clipped fish would certainly seem to be in the range. What's hard to know is how many of the non clipped fish were also hatchery fish that weren't clipped.  If a fair number of non clipped hatchery fish are being caught and released maybe the answer is simply clipping more fish, even if that requires rearing even more fish.

[drysideshooter]

As an update, I was just talking with a guy that works for me that asked if I had seen the press release. He showed it to me on his phone. Looks like it was voted yesterday to close the Columbia from Buoy 10 to the 395 bridge for steelhead and salmon fishing.  Didn't say when it will go into effect, but it sounds imminent.

UPDATE:  Just looked on the website, and starting tomorrow, the 22nd, salmon and steelhead is closed from Buoy 10 to the 395 bridge. Guessing that will make the Snake an absolute zoo.

[theleo]

It'll thin some people out. Not everybody that fishes McNary invests in an out of state Washington license.

[drysideshooter]

It'll thin some people out. Not everybody that fishes McNary invests in an out of state Washington license.

That's true, though my wife and I paid attention to the license plates on the trucks and trailers the other day and the majority at the WA side of the dam were WA plates.  There were about enough trucks and trailers there to account for the number of boats we saw, though some OR folks may have put in at Hat Rock and been fishing by the dam.  I am guessing the easily accessible close water like below and immediately above Ice Harbor may become a bit of a zoo with boats and bank anglers.  I will probably concentrate up river a bit where there is limited bank access and hopefully fewer boats.  I fished from below Ice Harbor to the mouth yesterday for most of the day. Usually during the week I can be entirely alone, or maybe one other boat on that stretch. Yesterday I saw four other boats close to the dam and a couple others trolling between the dam and the mouth.  Good numbers of fish on the sonar but nobody I talked with was catching anything.  I gave it a good effort with trolling a variety of lures at a variety of speeds, both directions, including some back trolling.  I also tried float fishing with just died shrimp plain, with a spin n glo, on a variety of jigs, and jigs alone, and some various pink worm offerings.  At one point I put the trolling motor on anchor lock and tried a wide variety of offerings with a steady flow of fish but no bites.   I found a couple pockets of what appeared to be holding fish and couldn't get them to take anything either.  I tried side drifting over a mile of river with some various offerings with no luck. Water temp was around 59.8.  I did see more fish throughout that stretch of river than I did holding in the dam area. The lock area was almost devoid of fish, and there weren't many right up to the limit line on the gate side.

[syoungs]

I think you'll see alot more fish showing up soon at ice harbor, I've always considered it more of a winter fishery

[drysideshooter]

I think you'll see alot more fish showing up soon at ice harbor, I've always considered it more of a winter fishery

Previously there were a lot of fish close to the bottom of the dam, out to the first visible island.  There have been a large number of fish above the dam for a few weeks now. They just haven't been biting regularly.  I saw one keeper caught on the bank at Charbonneau the other day, and one wild one released.  A guy on the bank caught a keeper on the ramp side of the dam last week by the lock.  I've been on the river 21 out of the past 24 days and spent quite a bit of time in that particular area.  Not a lot being caught yet, but hopefully with cooling water that will change. Saw quite a few fish in the river heading that way yesterday.  Not as many between the Snake and McNary in river the last week, though there was quite a few right at the dam the other day. The numbers over the lower dams have dwindled quite a bit and I doubt we will see many new fish over McNary heading up, but hopefully some.  Hoping it picks up a bit and it doesn't become a zoo.

[Sitka_Blacktail]

I have spent a fair amount of time lately talking with some fisheries biologists, one of whom told me about a study of hatchery vs wild fish that was done in Oregon a couple of years ago.

In that study, conducted on Deschutes  River steelhead it was found that about 80% of the fish in the system were hatchery fish, so wild fish comprised about 20%.  Of the total number of fish caught and landed though, wild fish represented about 85%.  At their Alsea facility they also did a study on the offspring of wild parents that were reared at the hatchery using the eggs and sperm from wild parents.  They found those offspring were about 5x more likely to bite than a hatchery fish produced by hatchery reared parents.  It has been known for a long time by biologists that hatchery fish aren't as aggressive and don't bite like wild fish, but this study seems to show just how great the disparity really is. 

Locally in the tricities area I don't think the rate of landed steelhead is quite so disparate, but I don't think it's great either, and it's probably going to get worse as there is no way to avoid a certain amount of dilution of the wild population by interbreeding with hatchery fish.  And something a lot of folks don't know is that only about 5% of hatchery fish actually get fin clipped, so some of the "wild" fish that are being returned are probably not really wild.   A recently retired biologist told me the other day that it's a problem that biologists are well aware of and they are trying to develop procedures to lessen it, but he said he didn't hold out a lot of hope for meaningful results.   That same biologist was fishing above McNary the other day and landed 3 wild steelhead.  I certainly know of several people that have had similar experiences where they catch several wild fish in one day.  Seems to lead me to believe that the wild fish are probably schooling and traveling together, and when there is a school of them the bite is probably better . 

As sad as it seems, without some sort of breakthrough the steelhead and salmon fishing is probably going to decline with no realistic way of bringing back some of the great wild fish DNA from fish like used to spawn in the Clearwater.   I haven't talked with anyone that has had a good chinook or steelhead season this fall.  I talked with a friend yesterday that just returned from the Clearwater and he said he did worse than he has in the last 20 years.  The day after the biologist landed 3 wild fish above McNary my wife and I fished there.  An average of 15 boats throughout the day, some trolling and others using eggs, shrimp and jigs.  We talked with quite a few fisherman.  In several hours there was one keeper caught over by the steep rock bank, and no wild fish caught and released. 

As sportsman I believe we need to write letters and let it be widely known that we expect better results for our license dollars and the tax revenue generated buying gear, boats, etc.  A breakthrough that leads to a meaningful improvement may be more likely if we start making some noise.   

Some funny numbers and percentages there. First off, if only 5% of hatchey fish are clipped, how do you really know what the % of fish being caught are? Most of those fish being caught are probably unclipped hatchery fish if that were true. 

But let's use 1,000 fish total for an example.  If 80% of them are hatchery fish, that makes 800 and 200 wild fish. But if you're identifying them by their fin being clipped, and that is only 5% of the hatchery fish, that means you can't have only 1,000 fish if you have 500 clipped fish because 5% is 1/20th of the total. So there must be 16,000 fish that are really hatchery fish.  But you'd be identifying most of them as wild fish because of no fin clipped. so you'd have 800 fish that you were identifying as hatchery fish with a clipped fin, and 15,200 that were identified as wild fish because of no clipped fin. So actually it would look like the run was 95% wild.  You see the problem with this story and these numbers yet? They don't match up with each other.  That's the trouble with using he said, she said stories like this as a basis of fact.

The other thing wrong with this story is that in actuality, hatchery fish out-compete wild fish just by their sheer numbers. It's why wild fish will never recover as long as hatcheries are being used to supplement runs. And on top of that hatchery fish can be exploited at a much higher rate than wild fish so seasons that allow lots of fishing to take advantage of hatchery stocks hurt wild fish.

Also, if you think hatchery fish don't compete, watch them at feeding time in the hatcheries. But they are several years removed from the hatcheries when they return. They have had to compete in the wild to survive.

[drysideshooter]

I have spent a fair amount of time lately talking with some fisheries biologists, one of whom told me about a study of hatchery vs wild fish that was done in Oregon a couple of years ago.

In that study, conducted on Deschutes  River steelhead it was found that about 80% of the fish in the system were hatchery fish, so wild fish comprised about 20%.  Of the total number of fish caught and landed though, wild fish represented about 85%.  At their Alsea facility they also did a study on the offspring of wild parents that were reared at the hatchery using the eggs and sperm from wild parents.  They found those offspring were about 5x more likely to bite than a hatchery fish produced by hatchery reared parents.  It has been known for a long time by biologists that hatchery fish aren't as aggressive and don't bite like wild fish, but this study seems to show just how great the disparity really is. 

Locally in the tricities area I don't think the rate of landed steelhead is quite so disparate, but I don't think it's great either, and it's probably going to get worse as there is no way to avoid a certain amount of dilution of the wild population by interbreeding with hatchery fish.  And something a lot of folks don't know is that only about 5% of hatchery fish actually get fin clipped, so some of the "wild" fish that are being returned are probably not really wild.   A recently retired biologist told me the other day that it's a problem that biologists are well aware of and they are trying to develop procedures to lessen it, but he said he didn't hold out a lot of hope for meaningful results.   That same biologist was fishing above McNary the other day and landed 3 wild steelhead.  I certainly know of several people that have had similar experiences where they catch several wild fish in one day.  Seems to lead me to believe that the wild fish are probably schooling and traveling together, and when there is a school of them the bite is probably better . 

As sad as it seems, without some sort of breakthrough the steelhead and salmon fishing is probably going to decline with no realistic way of bringing back some of the great wild fish DNA from fish like used to spawn in the Clearwater.   I haven't talked with anyone that has had a good chinook or steelhead season this fall.  I talked with a friend yesterday that just returned from the Clearwater and he said he did worse than he has in the last 20 years.  The day after the biologist landed 3 wild fish above McNary my wife and I fished there.  An average of 15 boats throughout the day, some trolling and others using eggs, shrimp and jigs.  We talked with quite a few fisherman.  In several hours there was one keeper caught over by the steep rock bank, and no wild fish caught and released. 

As sportsman I believe we need to write letters and let it be widely known that we expect better results for our license dollars and the tax revenue generated buying gear, boats, etc.  A breakthrough that leads to a meaningful improvement may be more likely if we start making some noise.   

Some funny numbers and percentages there. First off, if only 5% of hatchey fish are clipped, how do you really know what the % of fish being caught are? Most of those fish being caught are probably unclipped hatchery fish if that were true. 

But let's use 1,000 fish total for an example.  If 80% of them are hatchery fish, that makes 800 and 200 wild fish. But if you're identifying them by their fin being clipped, and that is only 5% of the hatchery fish, that means you can't have only 1,000 fish if you have 500 clipped fish because 5% is 1/20th of the total. So there must be 16,000 fish that are really hatchery fish.  But you'd be identifying most of them as wild fish because of no fin clipped. so you'd have 800 fish that you were identifying as hatchery fish with a clipped fin, and 15,200 that were identified as wild fish because of no clipped fin. So actually it would look like the run was 95% wild.  You see the problem with this story and these numbers yet? They don't match up with each other.  That's the trouble with using he said, she said stories like this as a basis of fact.

The other thing wrong with this story is that in actuality, hatchery fish out-compete wild fish just by their sheer numbers. It's why wild fish will never recover as long as hatcheries are being used to supplement runs. And on top of that hatchery fish can be exploited at a much higher rate than wild fish so seasons that allow lots of fishing to take advantage of hatchery stocks hurt wild fish.

Also, if you think hatchery fish don't compete, watch them at feeding time in the hatcheries. But they are several years removed from the hatcheries when they return. They have had to compete in the wild to survive.

A bit of a reading comprehension problem there. Read the study yourself. The 5% of hatchery fish being clipped is in WA each year. For the study in Oregon they marked all Deschutes hatchery fish for several years so they could positively identify the percentages being caught.  The two numbers don't have anything to do with each other.

Your comment about watching hatchery fish being fed is laughable!  I have been to hatcheries and seen that. You think how aggressive they take pellets placed before them indicates how aggressive of feeders they are once they are in the wild?  There are certainly quite a few studies and written opinions from biologists that say exactly the opposite.  I spent 33 years in Alaska and at least as far as wild salmon are concerned see a tremendous difference between those wild fish and the hatchery fish here.

Hatchery fish simply don't behave like wild fish when they are intent on returning to the hatchery.  A retired fish biologist of 30 years said it's a basic fact and is well known.

ON EDIT:  My wife and I have fly fished the Deschutes quite a bit for several years and have never landed a fin marked hatchery fish.  We also enjoy fishing the Fall River in Oregon for trout. One trip we checked out the Fall River hatchery and they had those machines where you could buy the pellets and toss them in and make the water boil with fish attacking them.  We joked that we should tie up a fly that looked like a hatchery pellet. 

[HUNTINCOUPLE]

The hatchery pellet fly has been used for many years.

[theleo]

I am guessing the easily accessible close water like below and immediately above Ice Harbor may become a bit of a zoo with boats and bank anglers.  I will probably concentrate up river a bit where there is limited bank access and hopefully fewer boats.  I fished from below Ice Harbor to the mouth yesterday for most of the day. Usually during the week I can be entirely alone, or maybe one other boat on that stretch. Yesterday I saw four other boats close to the dam and a couple others trolling between the dam and the mouth. 

A lot of guys will just travel up the Snake to Low Mo and Little Goose. The road from the dam up to the park will have people at every hole in the brush (guys have their favorite spots) and the jetty will have guys all along it. There gets to be quite a few people but honestly, it's nothing compared to Springers in May for craziness.

[drysideshooter]

The hatchery pellet fly has been used for many years.

That's funny, I have never actually seen one, and I am married to a lady that has a knee mounted fly vice and will tie up about anything that matches a hatch creek side.  I wouldn't actually use one anyway, too much like hunting a zoo animal. I have to admit to having a personal bias against "man made" fish.

I have no doubt the Snake will get crowded, especially this year with the closure. The jetty has already been packed several times this year.  I don't enjoy that type of fishing at all. I can remember fishing the Kenai and Russian rivers way before they ever became crowded and quit fishing there once they did.  I had a float plane and a jet sled when I lived in Alaska and enjoyed the ability to get away from the crowds.  My wife and I enjoy the Snake quite a bit for Walleye and Bass, mostly during the week when we often don't see another boat.  Even the Columbia close to the tricities is pretty devoid of other boats fairly often, even during salmon and steelhead if you stay away from the mouth of the Yakima.  At the height of the chinook run a couple weeks ago I would usually only see a few other boats between the 395 bridge and the downriver end of Bateman Island, and one of those was usually a guide boat.  I'm probably going to fish between Ice Harbor and Lower Monumental most days next week unless I do a day or two further up at Lyons Ferry or something.  If the bite isn't on fairly early in the week I may bag it and just go find some walleye. They should be putting on the feed bag about now.