How do you know where I'm from and what I know? Not that I need to justify it to you, but I'm from West Vancouver, spent decades fishing lower mainland and Vancouver Island rivers, including Cowichan and Stamp, on north Island Keogh, Cluxewe, Nahwiti. I did a biology degree at UBC focusing on fisheries, although I decided not to do a masters, many of my friends did working under guys like Carl Walters. I worked at the Capilano Hatchery for a time. At one time I did believe in hatcheries, but the body of evidence is so large now questioning their effectiveness I would like to see them mothballed where possible.
As an FYI its "You're not even from...", not "Your not even from......"
I guess I'd have to question who is living in the fantasy world. You have a ambitious, thorough study that looked specifically at the Cowichan river and whats happening in the estuary and even beyond. They sampled throughout the SOG. Its not extrapolating data from another system. It was done in the Cowichan, although likely relevant to other systems! the basic finding is that hatchery smolts have such low survival that there is little difference between the number of progeny returning from a pair of Chinook used as broodstock or if they were just left to spawn naturally. Its all from the study, not made up - read it. So essentially millions of $ are spent to feed the seals, mergansers, gulls and herons, and many of the smolts likely die of disease once their antibiotics are removed. So because you have worked with the people there (whom I'm sure are well intentioned and dedicated) and have seen all the smolts being raised that, "Trumps" the actual science? That's like the climate deniers knowing warming is not real because it was a cold last year in their area and the science is not real.
Not covered in the study, but it certainly could be speculated that wild fish survival is negatively impacted by the annual bonanza of plump hatchery clones being flushed into the estuary. The congregation of predators for the unnatural flooding of the estuary with smolts probably means some wild smolts get eaten that otherwise may not have. Wild smolts do not all migrate to the estuary at the same time, studies have shown they vary in age from 1 month to 17 months. There is considerable concern about Atlantic diseases being spread to pacific salmon, seems even more possible that hatchery smolts, which are more prone to disease could spread it to wild members of their own species. You can call this paragraph fantasy if you like, as its not from the study.
Perhaps the most concerning aspect of relying on hatchery smolts (in any river system) is the future. The SOG has warmed 1 degree in the last 50 years, its likely to do the same over the next 50. From the study: "Thus, it is possible to consider that the population structure in fresh water is an evolution of adaptation to conditions in the ocean in the immediate area of the ocean adjacent to the river. The concern is that as the Strait of Georgia continues to warm, it may be the evolved resiliency of the wild fish that are best able to adapt to the variability associated with the changing nearshore environment." This of course is not new, it has been known since Darwin theorized about it - Natural selection DOES matter.
I get it that the hatchery and and wild stocks mix on the spawning ground and there are no truly wild fish on the river anymore after decades and tens of millions of factory smolts being produced , and that's really a reason that hatcheries can cause significant damage to the gene pool because you can't separate them, and just another compelling argument against hatcheries, but that's not the subject of this paper . Substitute "naturally spawned" for anytime I mention "wild'.
