In our report (1), we set out to explicitly control for the ecological differences Haeseker (2) cites so that we could assess the effect of a critical policy issue: whether Snake River dam passage results in poorer early marine survival of juvenile Snake River spring Chinook salmon. Thus, we selected smolts of common size and manipulated release times to ensure smolts from the two populations were as similar as possible, apart from the number of dams that they passed (1). We agree with Haeseker that ecological differences between the populations used in our study existed and may have influenced ocean survival; however, their net effect needed to be a 3.4-fold difference in survival to result in the nearly identical rates of apparent survival that we found.