32 



I do feel that the way the supplementation has been used in 

 Alaska is a very good example of its use. I am not completely sure 

 that that plans for how it is going to be used in the other states in 

 the Northwest are exactly the same, and I am also worried about 

 comparing Alaska to the bther Northwest states because my under- 

 standing is that the habitat in Alaska is in much better shape to 

 begin with so it would make sense that the populations would re- 

 bound much more quickly with maybe even a lower level of human 

 intervention via hatcheries. 



So I don't know if that completely answers your question, but I 

 think actually when I talked about the need for genetic risk assess- 

 ment, that would be one thing if you were to go through a uniform 

 process of risk assessment that would be one way you could answer 

 your question, and you might decide in some cases the risk of 

 losing the population is too great, and we should intervene with a 

 well-designed hatchery program. And in other cases you might 

 decide otherwise, and I think we have made a mistake in the 

 region of coming up with just sort of one blanket answer, and the 

 situations are pretty diverse, and I don't think we can continue to 

 do that. 



Ms. FuRSE. Thank you. 



Mrs. Unsoeld. The gentleman from California. 



Mr. Hamburg. Thank you. Mr. Sayre, I want to thank you par- 

 ticularly for your kind of looking at the upbeat side of things, the 

 resilience of the salmon as a species and also pointing to the need 

 for not only leadership at the Federal level but also this kind of 

 grassroots efforts that have certainly been in evidence in the north- 

 ern part of my congressional district. I don't know if you have 

 heard of the work of the Mattole River Restoration Council, but 

 that is a good example of a community trying to take hold of the 

 destiny of a very important resource in their area. I think their ef- 

 forts have been somewhat circumscribed though by not being able 

 to really get a handle on the restoration of the entire watershed, 

 and I think that is always going to be a problem so I think we do 

 need the policy changes on the kind of macro level as well as the 

 local community commitment, and I just appreciate that you point- 

 ed that out and what sometimes seems kind of a grim topic, but 

 there are some good things that are happening and certainly some 

 more good things that can happen. 



Dr. Koenings, I wanted to ask you a question about the hatcher- 

 ies and artificial propagation techniques being limited to one or 

 two life cycles. You said that if we use prolonged supplementation 

 techniques that this could result in the replacement of wild fish 

 with hatchery fish, but my question is if the habitat is seriously de- 

 graded and the stocks are seriously depleted, is a limited supple- 

 mentation really feasible — really possible? 



Mr. Koenings. I guess an answer to that — a direct answer is 

 probably no — because the habitat is intact, and we view the habi- 

 tat basically as the driver for formation of the species — ecologically 

 significant unit — however you want to define it. If the habitat is 

 present, I think you can quickly restore stock through supplemen- 

 tation on one or two life cycles. If the habitat simply isn't there, 

 one wonders whether you can recreate the species that was origi- 



