The Coast Range Association Salmon & Survival Why Native and Hatchery Salmon are Different

The 1996 study of winter steelhead on the Kalama River came to a stark conclusion: "We cannot rebuild wild runs of steelhead with our hatchery programs."

Government scientists, academic scientists and some of the top fisheries biologists in the nation are reaching the same conclusion: Hatchery fish are genetically different from wild ones in ways that make them less able to survive in the wild - and therefore cannot be used to shore up flagging runs of salmon and steelhead.

The best existing scientific evidence leads to several clear conclusions:

· Wild salmonids have evolved a successful survival strategy over 40 million years or more based on precise adaptation to specific streams and maintaining a broad diversity of good adaptations among members of each deme that serve as a hedge against environmental adversity.

· Hatchery fish have simplified life histories (i.e., time spent at sea, run timing), poor ocean survival and substantially diminished reproductive success. These changes occur through domestication selection and outbreeding depression, show up in offspring after three or fewer generations and are permanent.

· Mixing these simplified, poorly adaptive fish and their genes into wild stocks threatens the survival of wild runs.

· Hatcheries serve a function in cases where a genetic line would otherwise go extinct. But attempts to use hatcheries to boost flagging wild runs have clearly failed to help and, in fact, actually harm locally adapted populations. Supplementation hatcheries should be eliminated.

In evolutionary terms, hatchery fish are inferior to wild fish. Their presence in the river, the ocean and the spawning grounds is harming the survival of wild fish both through direct interactions and by giving the public a false sense of salmon abundance.

For a century or more, hatcheries have been used as a substitute for salmonids' native habitat and as an excuse to allow destructive practices in that habitat. That experiment has failed. Restoring salmon and steelhead means turning away from a century of activities - including hatcheries - that have devastated the genes developed over millennia that have exquisitely adapted these fish to the streams and rivers and lakes of the Pacific Northwest. The nation's top scientists agree that returning as closely as possible to the condition in which salmonids evolved - including natural selection - is the most effective way to restore our 50-million-year-old natural heritage.

The only strategy for salmon conservation is the one they have developed for themselves over the past 50 million years. This strategy means there must be a social and institutional commitment, backed and based on scientific information, to maintain wild salmon and the habitats that support them in each watershed where they are found.

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