The dilemma I see personally with alot of the steelhead and salmon restoration efforts is that the habitat is so broken and beyond repair it seems impossible to bring them back to anything meaningful. And it seems that it's been this way for 20+ years already, probably since the mid 1960s really. Feels like token efforts at this point to preserve the illusion of a real population. There was the illusion of king salmon due to hatchery programs, but really not a self sustaining population. Now the bay gets so warm the smolts are all dying after the truck dumps them.

There was a very recent horrifying study (I'll look it up and post it) about mutated striped bass fry on the Sacramento River, currently *90%* of freshly hatched stripers are so deformed they die solely from their deformities within 3 days of hatching... including in the lab!! 90% dead in the lab!!! The control group in pure clean water had an almost 0% mortality rate!! They cited pollutants in the water as the problem if I remember correctly. Severe spine deformity is the main thing showing up. So 90% of the spawn is wiped away purely from water pollution, the remaining 10% subjected to <1:1000 normal survival rate or whatever it is, then the party boats slaughter, then they get poached commercially, then pretty soon you notice that you're fishing harder and harder, chasing a dwindling angling opportunity.

Makes those big hens with their millions of eggs very very important to leave in the water!!!

I've also been catching some stripers here and there that have the hockey stick spine these evidently were not deformed enough to die quickly.

Maybe someday half the fish we catch will be deformed!

Let's keep a close eye on anything involving "predator species" language!!! We may see an effort to eradicate bass somewhere here pretty quick.

Marcus