Here comes the sockeye! Thanks to Frank Urabeck!

[Todd]

Some take home messages:

1. The more fry, the less productive. This is pretty much one of the most basic tenets of biology, but the "plant more, get more" mentality is by far the majority feeling out there.

2. Food in the lake is THE limiting factor. This is tied tightly to #1...the more fish feeding, the worse they do.

3. Odd year returns will yield virtually no fisheries, ever, no matter how many fry are born/released.

4. Knock the escapement goal in half and there will be fisheries about half the years, and enough escapement to maintain fishable levels...this will be fishing over around 300k fish every open season, and harvesting around half of them.

5. This could have been done with a sweep of a pen, instead of a $30.5 Million hatchery...and not only that, that sweep of the pen is still required to do it, even with the hatchery.

Fish on...

Todd

[Nelly]

Thanks for going to the trouble of posting all that information Todd.
I know that there are plenty of scientificly valid reasons not to spend the $30 million on a hatchery.

My problem is that there are lots of reasons the government has for not doing anything at all for our salmon.

What no fisheries biologist can tell us is what exactly happens with Lake Washington's productivity when it does send enough juveniles through the Ballard Locks to produce a fishery!

I have the opportunity to spend time on the lower end of the LW system and I can tell you first hand that cormorants in both Lake Union and the Locks are more prevalent than ever. These winged vermin are huge and their droppings sparkle with juvenile salmon and steelhead scales.

Let's get the fry in the Lake, get the University of Washington's Fisheries Research Institute on the productivity issue and petition WDFW to allow waterfowlers to harvest cormorants along with ducks and geese in the fall.

With all the welfare entitlements, needle-exchange programs and Seattle's 20 million dollar bridge for bicyclists, I say us fishermen take this 30 million dollar hatchery and find a way to make it produce a fishery and not more cormorant feces.