Quote Originally Posted by Betty Hiner View Post
It changes the fishs' genetic structuring to be brought into the hatchery? How does that happen?
Betty,

Not in a single generation but when hatchery fish are "recycled" by becoming the brood stock, and this occurs generation after generation of brood stock, there is regression toward the mean. What happens is that in a hatchery, there is no mechanism to "weed" out the weaker fish as nature does in the wild. So the next set of brood stock will be genetically inferior to their parents. And this will happen generation after generation of brood stock until you have hatchery fish that significantly inferior to wild fish.

Hatcheries should be a way to provide fish where there would be no fish. Some fish are better than no fish. But to say that the average hatchery fish is the equal to the average wild fish is simply wrong thinking.

The argument that a holdover "naturalized" hatchery fish is just like a wild fish is wrong. If you hooked a holdover hatchery trout, you might think that it is the equal of a wild bred fish. But that is because you have no standard of comparison.

If you have 1000 hatchery young of the year fish and 1000 young of the year wild fish, only a few of the hatchery fish will survive to be "naturalized." If you hooked the best fish of the surviving natural fish and the best fish of the 1000 natural fish, the hatchery fish would be inferior in fight to the natural fish. In a direct one to one comparison, you would be able to feel the difference. But if you have fished only in a stocked fishery, you really have no valid way to compare.

Fishery biologists have compared hatchery trout to wild trout. Google the fisheries literature to check it out.

In nature, only the best of every generation survive to breed. Nature weeds out the genetically inferior fish.

This is the basis of Wisconsin's Wild Trout planting program. Wild trout are captured during spawning and the eggs are milked and fertilized. The wild trout are raised in hatcheries but wild trout do not tolerate the crowding of hatchery fish so fewer fish can be raised. Then a proportion of the fish are replanted into the river that the eggs were taken from to make up for the fish that would have survived a natural spawn. The rest are planted into streams to help create a natural reproducing fishery.

If hatcheries raised only wild trout, then hatchery fish would equal wild fish. Unfortunately this is not the case.