Mother Nature

Regular correspondent Josh Mills talks about some of the reproductive strategies for steelhead. "There are documented instances where female, adult steelhead will be spawning in a stream and what the principles call a sneaker male will come in and add his genetic imprint to the eggs she has dropped whilst the big male steelhead doesn't see the little guy come in and the more genetic diversity that happens with in the wild population segments mean that not just one male steelhead will fertilize one female steelhead, you have multiple partners coming in and fertilizing eggs. So again it passes on a lot of genetic information that you just can't reproduce in a hatchery or any thing like that. That's why one of the things that the Elwha River represents in Northwest Washington on the Olympic Peninsula, you have dozens upon hundreds of miles of habitat that lay within the Olympic national Park and when they took two dams out on the Elwha, these fish have the opportunity to access the sea for the first time in 100 years. Not knowing exactly what is happened but salmon are spawning above the dams within the first 3 to 6 months after the dam removal and the thought is that the steelhead will go out to sea and then return. That's why some of these fish go out for only a couple of months in the ocean and come back. Some will spend 1 to 3 years depending on what rivers they are from as part of this grand scheme that mother nature allows to safeguard against bad things happening to the population.