Well I guess it's a guessing game as to the future of the alewife and the Salmon after this year.I think that is what that report is saying.I hope the alewife are real horny this year and there are lots of young ones produced.

Interesting read tuna and thanks for sharing. I dont have the time to read back at the moment on this thread, But it is quite ironic, a fishery based off of controlling an over abundant alewife population may have finally put the nail in the coffin. Makes one wonder... Stockings were reduced in the middle 90's... In time the base summer flows became prevalent. In time a large wild population has morphed. Could it have been the reduction in hatchery stocks, coupled with better summer flows, that allowed this natural phenomenon of wild reproduction take place... Which in turn may be a large contribution towards the alewife being depleted??? Just like everyone says, just a guess here guys

Btw, I shouldnt of used any punctuation in my last post , wouldve been good competition for two bob in the run on sentence conpetition :)

Sounds like reduced stockings to preserve  bait stock- can't blame them.

What a tightrope to walk....   DB, your point about the wild stocks becoming a "wild card" is very good. Hard to plan for how many fish would be recruited from natural reproduction and balance that against baitfish stocks. Tough, tough , tough. And then we have a few of the worst winters in the past century.

From what I am gathering it's a combination of many factors. Increased natural reproduction of chinooks, increased invasive ( which is omitted) and back to back winter kill on the ecosystem.
It may be a tough road ahead . Hope the steelhead do survive and this could possibly be a return to a more natural state of the lake ,, possibly = Atlantic salmon & lake trout.
Atlantic catch rate on the lake is very high right now for 2 year olds this season so far.

Ya know, the rumors of cutting the kings out have been flying around for years since the atlantic program started. To my knowledge, they have recently had a successful strain of mature spawning pairs of atlantics showing up for a few years now... No big numbers... But mature and capable of spawning... Couple that with the charter captains who are charting large schools of bait... Conspiracy???? Lol

Im interested to know if such in depth research was done back in the late 90s when we had a semi mini crash... Low numbers of chinook, small fish, and more lakers than steelhead in the river was commonly often... What were the bait populations like the??? L13, can you shed some light on this? My opinion of those times were personal observation only... Fished the river pretty hard in those days

Also, how long have they been doing eel treatment? We all know about the huge walleye kill in sandy pond some years back... Ive been personally observing for some years now that many of the very small fry (wild born chinooks) as well as hatchery stocked parr seem to disappear right after they do the eel treatment. Just this past weekend I saw a few dead eels and two dead mud puppies... Yes mud puppies. Granted, there still are some fry and parr... But not as many... I understand they need to control the eel population. But it's hard to believe such fragile fry and parr can survive in abundance. But who am I to question science I guess

As far as the Lakers I remember hearing something that there was a different strain of Lakers tried for a few years in limited numbers that had more of a tendency to venture up stream a little. Just hearsay, but do recall hearing it.