Randall Kaufmann is one sharp fly tier and innovator. He is master at taking old patterns and blessing them with a make-over. This fly is one that Randall made magic with. It is like the Starlight Leech, the Egg Sucking Leech, and dozens of other patterns. All fish well and all are fun to tie. These flies use dumbbell eyes to get them down deep. Generally, they have relatively slim bodies and a palmered hackle.
Go get your boxes stocked with Dredger like flies, make up your own color combinations, and have fun – at the bench and on the river.
Jay Nicholas
January 2012
Kaufman’s Dredger Pink
Hook: TMC 700 #2-6
Tail: Pink Marabou
Pink Holographic Flashabou and UV Pink Krystal flash
Rib: Copper Wire
Body: Fl Pink Ultra Chenille Standard
Hackle: Pink Saddle
Eyes: Large Fly Chartreuse Painted Lead Eyes
Head: Fl. Shrimp Pink Med Chenille
Jay, a question unrelated to the video. Can you comment on the Salmon for Oregon insert that was in the Register Guard a few days ago. It was a “paid advertisement” that quoted Dr. James Lannon saying “…there are absolutely no genetic differences between wild and hatchery salmon.” Go to http://www.salmonfororegon.org for info.
This smells “fishy” as in salmon farming fishy. Reminds of the actual results of the “clean air act” some years ago where the act increased pollution levels allowed. I’m sorry that my bias is showing. But I do want an unbiased scientific assessment of what was said in this insert.
Thanks.
Jim
Jim, after writing several responses and deleting them all, I will take one stab at this, and no more. Please.
I think the quote was correct. I think that Dr. Lannan did say that, or implied that, or something very close to what was printed in the paper. I am a survivor of the Private Salmon Ranching years. I was there and saw and heard it all.
If you asked me a question like “is there a genetic difference between all hatchery and all wild salmon”, here is how I would answer you.
Let’s go out in the ocean and pretend we are aliens on a spaceship and we send the claw down into the sea and grab one salmon and hoist it into the part of the space ship where they insert the probes and analyze the life form and try to figure out if it is a hatchery or a wild salmon and guess what? The aliens couldn’t tell the whether the salmon was hatched in a plastic tray or in a river. This is the case, as I understand it, because there are no genetic “markers” that are unique to all hatchery salmon or absent from all wild salmon.
So the aliens can’t tell the difference between a hatchery salmon and a wild salmon. Neither can we, in absence of a lot of additional information.
But we can tell the difference between hatchery and wild salmon if we have genetic data from different parental groups, and this is why scientists can sort out issues of productivity in hatchery and wild steelhead in studies like have been conducted in Hood River and in places like the Umpqua where the contribution of hatchery coho fry has been examined using genetic pedigree studies. These are very sophisticated analyses and can actually tell us a whole lot about the parentage and origin of “naturally spawned” adult salmon and steelhead including whether their parents were from a hatchery group or a wild group.
Now I know you are probably asleep by now, but do you follow so far? Unlikely. Remember that humans share a HUGE amount of our genetic material with Chimpanzees and apes. (Note: the information just presented was obtained from Sci. Fi. movies and may or may not be true) The point is that in the absence of detailed information about a group of fish, there are no genetic characters that independently and universally disclose the parentage of a salmon as being either hatchery or wild.
There are many problems with going down this path of over-simplification. Just because one can not pluck a salmon out of the ocean and clearly identify it as a hatchery or a wild salmon, does not mean that there are no differences between hatchery and wild salmon. Of course there are genetic differences between hatchery and wild salmon, just as there are genetic differences between hatchery salmon from different hatcheries and there are genetic differences between wild salmon from different rivers and so on.
Nowadays, there are databases that can allow researchers to pull a sample of salmon from the ocean and make some reasonable assessments of the stock origin or those fish, say a certain percentage from the Sacramento and a percentage from the Klamath and a percentage from the Rogue and so forth. But these evaluations require the existence of a database of known-origin fish before one may do the science magic to tell you about where the salmon came from.
Egads I hope this is even partly understandable. Salmon from different hatcheries have different genetic characteristics to govern run and spawning timing, the fat reserves they depend on to make long migrations, age at smolting and age at maturity, where they go in the ocean, how many temperature units it takes for the eggs to hatch and their disease susceptibility and resistance and more traits than i care to list here. The same is true for wild salmon from different rivers. Some stocks of salmon are very similar genetically to nearby stocks, some may be quite different genetically from geographically close stocks and so on.
Point is, folks who claim that there are no genetic differences between hatchery and wild salmon are making that statement based on an extremely narrow definition – the space alien example above – and the claim ends up being misleading, even it it is true in one very narrow sense.
I give up.
Both hatchery and wild salmon have genetic characteristics that make them more or less well suited to survive and reproduce in specific environments. Making a case that all salmon are all genetically “interchangeable” is nonsense, is in injustice to both hatchery and wild fish, and if followed to the letter, would create chaos in salmon hatchery programs.
Please please please don’t ask me if there is such a thing as a “wild” salmon after a century of hatchery salmon propagation here in the Pacific Northwest. Of course there are wild salmon today.
And then there is the mis-understood concept that genetic diversity is good so therefore the more genetic diversity there is the better salmon are for the mixing. Nonsense. Genetic diversity within a population is beneficial up to a point (and not one that I am qualified to define) but diversity can be exaggerated by spawning fifty females from fifty different rivers with fifty males from yet again fifty more different rivers and man-oh-man would that be a genetically diverse bunch of salmon babies that would probably be very poorly suited to survive in any one of the hundred rivers their mommas a daddies came from.
So there. All the answers to all the scientific questions answered neatly and finally. Thank you very much. Too much caffein, apparently, and too little sleep, and not enough restraint in the brain and keyboard connection.
I resolve to never do this again. I re-read my response and find it far from complete or satisfying but to erase the whole thing again and remain silent is not gonna cut it so I will live with this and most likely suffer the consequences.
JN
You had me at “Jim.”
Thanks. I grasp the “no difference” when looking at two individual salmon. I’m glad you mentioned diversity and I was thinking about diversity in the runs of specific rivers, which I assume is good. So the population of hatchery or salmon farm runs should be different from the population of naturally reproducing runs. However, even after 2 hours of driving in the dark to get an early start fishing I never fantasized about 50 males and 50 females from 50 different rivers getting it on and I’m sure that Rick Santorum, if elected president, would never allow such promiscuity even among salmon.
I’ll keep watch on “SalmonforOregon” and I hope you do too. No need for a response. Go back to the bench.
Thanks
Great response. However, ….
Salmon is a wild being. From Webster’s, wild: living in a state of nature well adapted to a natural environment and not ordinarily tame or domesticated; not amenable to human cultivation; marked by turbulent agitation. Salmon was an indigenous being. Indigenous: having originated in and being produced, growing, or living naturally in a particular region. We have long violated the essence character of Pacific salmon. We no longer make a distinction between native or indigenous salmon stocks (fish which have not been substantially impacted by genetic interactions with non-native stocks), and “naturally” produced fish. By definition our “wild” salmon now include the progeny of native fish and the progeny of hatchery-origin fish that have “leaked” into the wild to reproduce. It is questionable whether any pure native migratory salmon stocks remain in the Pacific Northwest.
Although the salmon are highly resilient and adaptive, they are also keenly sensitive to their homewaters. The failure of the vast majority of hatchery stocks and transfers of foreign stocks to generate self-sustaining populations within their historic range attests to the general lack of interchangeability of salmon stocks and indicates that “local populations may be largely irreplaceable on human time frames” (Robin Waples). The loss of these populations would “represent a loss of ecological and genetic diversity that might be difficult to replace even on evolutionary time frames (Robin Waples).”
Of course the neighborhood ain’t what it was, historic ranges which molded and supported indigenous stocks no longer remain either. From an alien point of view it could be that our domesticated salmon are well suited to our domesticated watersheds, and well suited to domesticated fishermen.
Sam, you’re a poet.
Jay, you are a treasure.
Between the both of you I’m feeling a little better about humanities chances…