A new study has revealed that the impact of a hatchery environment on steelhead trout is so profound that in just one generation genetic traits are developed that cost fish the natural ability to be able to survive in the wild.

Nineteen years of research on the Hood River in Oregon will have both scientists and anglers in an uproar once it’s common knowledge that we’ve been unknowingly selecting for big sea-run trout that like concrete ditches and prefer the taste of dried kibble …

… and will we be able to look that thousand dollar spey rod festooned with black nickle and dripping acres of rare and exotic dander, without feeling less the Man and so very shortchanged … perhaps dirty even?

We’ve known for some time that hatchery-born fish are less successful at survival and reproduction in the wild,” said Michael Blouin, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University. “However, until now, it wasn’t clear why. What this study shows is that intense evolutionary pressures in the hatchery rapidly select for fish that excel there, at the expense of their reproductive success in the wild.

-via Worldfishing & Aquaculture

In short we’ve been catching the social moths, the trollops, and the used car salesmen of the steelhead world.

What’s worse is the potty mouth diet we’ve been catering to … These being the Twinkie eaters, the migrating fish that dine at fish ladders and Chinese takeout rather than forage for a meal, and all those wonderful and intricate patterns that have proven so successful have been a colorful representation of the hatchery ditch followed by a shovel full of desiccated dog chow.

We sure showed them, opposing thumb and big frontal lobe really proving the difference this time.

I’m going back to salmon roe goober and florescent marshmallows, food befitting some fat-bottomed fish struggling for breath on the cobble, trying to gasp out more fart jokes …

I suppose if I owned a boat I’d feel worse, but the article concludes that even short bursts of noise can distract fish while feeding, and they’ll make more errors in judgment and ingest things they shouldn’t …

The foraging mistakes are consistent with a shift in attention when exposed to noise, and in the natural environment these mistakes could be costly: increasing the chances of ingesting harmful items, and affecting the risk of predation if fish have to forage for longer to compensate for reduced efficiency.

I’m not so sure science was expecting to be serving information to the enemy, fellows like myself reading the conclusion and hanging on every word …

… but in elementary school we learned we could unnerve a good hitter at the plate by yelling, “hey batter-batta, SWING ..”, and anyone watching golf has to believe science, given anything louder than a duck fart sends a dimpled ball through someone’s picture window and muttered curses by even the most practiced golfer.

Can we induce a fish to eat something the wrong size, wrong species, and if so – how far away from the fishes maw do we trigger the underwater equivalent of a car alarm?

Taking it a step further, if we run out of the hot fly can a tantrum at the precise moment make something less worthy, extra-tasty? It’s certain we swear often enough in critical situations, perhaps we need to do so much louder …

I suppose SIMM’s will break the thousand-dollar barrier when it adds zippers and Sensurround, and then we can race each other out of parking lot to set hook while fiddling with the volume on Walkürenritt …

Now they’re not so sure.

Recent studies suggest the adipose fin is crucial to fish, aiding it in navigating turbulent water.

With the tiny fin removed, he says the fish need to use much more energy to maintain position and speed in the water.

- via CBC News Canada

Given that the practice is especially prevalent with salmonids, which re-enter fresh water when it is most turbulent, it may have been one of many reasons why hatchery fish have never adequately replaced indigenous populations.

Makes you wonder whether we’ve been our own worst enemy, accidentally even. 

Then again, once I saw the hurried exodus of neighbors, hastily packed luggage crammed into idling vehicles, and the vexed expressions of those waiting in the car while [insert_family_member] went one last time, I realized in addition to being the only person home this weekend, I’d have to bring my own glass to the water, as it would be the only surface absent beer cans and a flotilla of V-8’s.

And while all those vacationers hoped to rendezvous with the Pristine, be it casino-based or Mother Nature’s Original Recipe, I strode up her seamy underbelly counting noses in sync with the measured beat of tires on bridge seams.

… and the noses were suddenly plentiful and varied, much to my surprise. All that lifeless gravel now colored with a bit of welcome algae, and host to an early morning Trico spinner fall that was twice as thick as year’s past, suggesting all those shifting tons of gravel buried much of the streambed, but has been assimilated and is home for bugs as well as fish.

I landed quite a few Pikeminnow, who have always appeared to bounce back quickly, and both Bluegill and Sunfish, even hooking a holdover bass that shook me free in a deeper pool.

Most importantly, schools of small fish are visible everywhere, and plenty of largemouth and smallmouth bass are among them. The one-inch fry of Spring have turned into the four inch minnow of early fall, and while it’s easy to miss the first, the latter are large enough to be seen at distance.

The science of stream recovery has proven to be much more valuable to the fisherman than you’d suspect. While it’s certain few have any interest in a coarse fishery, plodding all these miles of riverbank is birthing the newer svelte version, and through observation has taught me where fish go when stressed, where they linger if forced from their comfort zone, and what rate can anglers count on for the natural regenerative processes to spread surviving bugs and fish throughout a traumatized watershed.

There’s enough of the Precious left for our generation to frolic in, yet it’s a comfort to know that someone’s child will have a chance to commune with Nature – or at least her coarse black heart – once the Earth’s crust warms those few fateful degrees and trout are an afterthought in the fossil record.

Science suggests that it

Firstly, it may hurt their feelings, and secondly, given that it’s successful in outcompeting the local fare means it’s possibly superior (owning Adonis DNA), and may simply be species extincting a weaker occupant of the same resource …

In short, as history is written by the victors, it’s merely a Darwin thing, not a full fledged invasion.

To illustrate the peaks and valleys of successful science allow me to mention how a recent study in Japan illustrates how a terrestrial snail has a 15% chance of survival given their digestion by birds and crapped out after the full tour of the gastrointestinal tract …

This is the first study of its kind to show that the bird’s and their droppings are able to disperse living snails to other geographical locations. One snail managed to show the researchers that entire snail families could be transported by the birds. Not long after being ingested, one small gave birth to juveniles not long after passing through the gut of the bird.

Turn of the century studies have shown that diatoms can pass through a bird gut unharmed, given the armor of snails and their small size it’s not surprising that incomplete digestion might occur and birds might disperse a viable population outside their normal range.

In our continual battle against “Superior Darwin-esque victor-species” birds (ducks especially) may well be responsible for a portion of their travels.

Think didymo, mussels and snails …

… and for the Invasive chuckle of the week …

The Giant Salvinia is one of the more horrific invasives being battled intensely in the Southern United States. It spreads faster than daylight and completely chokes off lakes and waterways – rendering them impossible to navigate due to sheer volume of weed.

Giant salvinia is able to double in number and biomass in less than three days in optimal conditions and forms dense mats on still waters. The plant can regenerate even after severe damage or drying. The explosive growth of giant salvinia not only adversely affects the natural ecological system of the infested region, but it also causes considerable economic damage and sanitation problems.

… and has recently been found to cure cancer in humans, go figure.

I’ll wait until the AMA confirms the finding before grabbing a couple handfuls for my tub, a vain attempt to make up for all them cheap cheroots I sucked down earlier.

I suppose the good news

Looking down, I think I’ll be safe enough, given that I haven’t seen mine in a couple of decades, but the rest of you concern me.

With societal censure clinging to us outdoorsy types like a dark cloud, issues like Catch & Release, invasive species, trespass, the despoiling of the watershed with our two and four wheeled gas guzzlers, planted versus wild, and the delight we show in blowing daylight through the arse end of anything exhaling CO2, have painted a bright target on our backs.

Now all them fellows we teased in school roam the halls of science and are determined to blame us for undoing millions of years of genetic selection, how all the small fish is our doing.

After studying data going back to 1943, Kendall has discovered that the average length of a (Bristol Bay) sockeye salmon is now 14 millimeters (0.25”) shorter than it used to be. She also discovered that the number of sockeye that spent two, instead of the normal three years, out at sea before coming upstream to lay their eggs, had increased by 16%, suggesting Mother Nature was trying to make up for losses incurred due to fishing.

- via PhysOrg.com

While nets and the size of their mesh is doing the bulk of the selection, our squeezing the life out of the big fish so we can show Ma, thumping the SOB as its bigger then most, or bouncing Fatty off the rocks while the guide gets pictures 62 through 74, has to play some small part.

What took thousands or even millions of years of evolution to accomplish, has been undone in just a couple of centuries of human fishing practices.

Just a reminder that you guys suck.

It couldn’t have been me, all I ever catch is dinks …

Total dollar value for all farmed

Idaho is the largest grower of commercial trout in the US, accounting for 50% of the nationwide total.

For trout 12 inches or longer, 64 percent were sold to processors and 17 percent were sold for recreational stocking.

Surely it sounds boring and innocent enough, but if trout farms sell 17% of their fish as recreational stockers, it suggests that all manner of genetically manipulated lumpy genomes will be plying our waterways in short order.

Twice the muscle mass and half the brains would be a formidable temptation for some angling enthusiast with a small pond, who wants something other than a traditional warm water fishery in his backyard.

Fast forward to the Asian Carp and a flooded farm pond, whose sudden presence in the Mississippi is liable to rewrite what’s native to North America for the next millennia.

Both trout farmers and salmon growers have insisted genetically modified fish would be grown inland, in restrictive ponds that wouldn’t allow release into the wild, and while much of the recreational stocking is likely state hatcheries purchasing fingerling fish to offset unforeseen calamity at one or more of their facilities, it sets the stage for the accidental towing of the wrong semi to the wrong destination, and suddenly that airtight glove of security is so very porous…

I finished my read

Sure enough, our pal Rotenone coupled with gill netting will be the preferred fish killing method, gill nets deployed by a vendor in the lake proper, and follow-up chemical work for all the tributaries that lack some natural barrier to upstream migration.

I find it surprising that Fish & Game hatchery theory is predicated on us happy anglers killing our limit, but whenever they need to lay waste to a watershed – they never invite us to help ..

Rotenone effects both fish and invertebrates in largely the same way, especially prone are gill-bearing insects that derive oxygen from the water via beating of gills. Naturally that includes everything trout eat, so when the florescent green nasty finally is dissipated by a couple of sacks of Potassium Permanganate, it’ll leave a stream or lake mostly empty of life.

Despite Rotenone having been our chemical mainstay for fish killing for nearly 50 years, but very little science exists on the effects of rotenone on surrounding flora and fauna.

Some of that science is bubbling up unbidden given its linkage to Parkinson’s Disease. Likely making a lot of fellows at fish & game nervous and thinking of transfer from the chemical division back to enforcement …

While that topic is hotly debated, what papers we could find on Rotenone suggests that years are necessary before a stream returns to its historic insect populations, and some streams never return to their pre-poisoning levels.

Why is it so important? Because its use is on the rise given that we’re having to defend both shores and the interior from invasives. Running a multi-day slug of toxic killing agent through most of the tributaries and canals hosting an invasive critter is liable to intersect with drinking water and kids splashing merrily, and if they haven’t baked all that science thoroughly we all could be walking through Love Canal too – the Sequel.

The good news is that now that we no longer care about spotted owls, we can always park some Claymores around the last drizzle of water containing Tricorythodes … then camp in the fast water insisting we won’t budge in between fits of our teeth chattering.

The trout and steelhead are the same species, interbreeding between the two being commonplace.

In a field study in Hood River, Ore., researchers used DNA analysis to determine that up to 40 percent of the genes in returning steelhead came from wild rainbow trout, rather than other steelhead. And only 1 percent of the genes came from “residualized” hatchery fish – fish that had stayed in the stream and mated, but not gone to sea as intended by the hatchery program.

- via PhysOrg.com

No mention was made whether additional complications arise from hatchery steelhead and hatchery trout being planted in the same watershed, and whether that would prove an additional source of dilution.

The study reveals a complex picture of wild trout and steelhead intermingling as they reproduce. A steelhead might be produced by the spawning of two steelhead, two wild trout, or a returning steelhead and a trout.

Given the research covers a 15 year span and analysis of 12,000 steelhead, it’s fairly compelling. As scientists still cannot explain why one fish heads for saltwater and another doesn’t, it’s nice to know that as we pull down some of these old irrigation dams that are no longer needed, one or more small tributaries might contain remnants of the original strain trout – and therefore the original strain of steelhead, once thought extinct.

Makes for an unusual management issue. Many scientists are already on record that trout and steelhead are the same fish, and given that its no longer two distinct species how can you persist separate regulations for each? It would seem a canny lawyer could argue a 10 fish limit, 20 in possession held for the larger oceangoing variant as well as those pumped into the water at the Bridge Pool …

The farmed fish industry

Those runs have climbed and dropped precipitously in the past, again without explanation. UC Davis scientists continue to shrug about what happened, but the farmed fish induced lice theory gets scrapped.

The new study is the first to analyze 20 years of fish production data and 10 years of sea-lice counts from every salmon farm in the Broughton Archipelago and compare them against 60 years of population counts of adult pink salmon.

The study concludes that farm fish are indeed the main source of sea lice on the area’s juvenile wild pink salmon, but it found no statistical correlation between lice levels on the farms and the lifetime survival of wild pink salmon populations.

- via PhysOrg.com

The nature of science is a bit unpredictable, so I would wait for corroboration from other sources before speaking definitively on the subject.

What is finite and well defined is how few wild fish are in my supermarket. Instead of a nice fillet that I can inspect I have meat hidden in gaily colored opaque bags announcing themselves as fresh Halibut, Salmon, and Cod – each torn from the icy bosom of untouched Atlantic or Pacific Oceans, yearning to join me at dinner …

… it’s too much like a blind date, and I can’t bring myself to buy any.

As most fellows aren’t the cook and bottle-washer and blind to the trends of supermarket aisles, unable to tell the whether the object is a mango or a dog turd … 95% of all fish* (includes squid, scallops, shrimp, and fish-like substance) for sale are farmed.

Occasionally they’ll have a salmon head or fillet in a transparent wrapper, but almost all of the indigenous white fleshed fish are now opaque wrapped – so you won’t see the acne scars, footprints, or notice it’s still moving … kinda …

Doctors insist anything living in water is nutritious and an important source of Omega-3 oils, but I’ll opt to be cautious and get my oil downstream of that leaking lawnmower in the Bridge Pool, which should be surrogate enough …