Here is an excerpt from a paper I posted earlier this year by Jim Lichatowich, it's in the conservation forum if you care to read the whole thing.
Author Richard Powers has condensed the importance of genetics into an easily understandable statement. He was speaking of plants and forests, but the idea is applicable to salmon.
"At some time over the last 400 million years, some plant [or for our purposes some fish] has tried every strategy with a remote chance of working. We’re just beginning to realize how varied a thing working (emphasis added) might be. Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes. To solve the future, we must save the past.51
Life tells a story of survival to future generations of trees, wild salmon and all living beings. That story is written in their genes."
The future of salmon depends on the how well the present generation of salmon can talk to future generations of salmon about the lessons acquired during their long evolutionary testing. The best hope for the future of salmon is to save the past, save those priceless lessons. Unfortunately, the hatchery, which is the primary tool of commodity-oriented salmon management, rewrites the story of wild salmon survival acquired through evolutionary trial and error. Adaptation to the hatchery environment occurs rapidly in a single generation. The change can be significant. First generation hatchery steelhead trout showed a difference in the expression of 723 genes compared to wild steelhead.52
The question is, which survival story, the one contained in the genes of wild salmon and steelhead or the altered story in the genes of hatchery salmon and steelhead, will be more beneficial to future generations? If the answer is the wild salmon’s survival story, the region must quickly change salmon management’s status quo.