'Saving' Wild Salmon's Bucket-Born Cousins

LSEA, Ore., Jan. 30 There are wild salmon in rivers across the Pacific Northwest, fish that spawn in gravel beds and grow in the rushing fresh water. Then they head deep into the Pacific Ocean before journeying back to spawn and die in the streams where they were born.

There are also salmon that complete a similar voyage, though they are born in and return to a different place, a government-run hatchery. Spawned in plastic pails, raised in concrete pools, they are the majority in many Northwestern rivers now, as their wild cousins battle extinction.

But because the wild and hatchery salmon are of the same species, they are at the heart of a legal battle over the issue of extinction, and of just how much should be done to protect and restore the habitat that wild salmon need to spawn. The question is this: What is the difference between wild fish and hatchery ones?

Absolutely none, say some critics of the Endangered Species Act, who contend that federal fish regulators have wrongly looked only at the condition of the wild salmon to determine whether fish in rivers like the Alsea, here in the Oregon coastal range, should be considered threatened. A federal judge largely agrees with them, ruling in September that regulators "arbitrarily and capriciously" treated the Alsea's wild and hatchery salmon differently when listing the wild fish as threatened....