Doing their research: Siskiyou County officials study Coos Bay salmon project
By John Bowman
Siskiyou Daily News, Yreka, CA
By John Bowman
Updated Feb. 18, 2013 @ 4:36 pm
COOS BAY, Ore.
By John Bowman
Updated Feb. 18, 2013 @ 4:36 pm
» Social News
Recently, Siskiyou County Supervisor Michael Kobseff and county Natural Resource Policy Specialist Ric Costales made the nearly five-hour drive to Coos Bay, Ore. to watch partially developed salmon eggs being planted in the gravel of coastal streambeds. The trip was part of the county's effort to implement the same process in the Shasta River in an attempt to aid the recovery of coho salmon there.
Since the coho salmon was listed by the federal government as threatened in the southern Oregon and northern California coastal region in 1997, the fish has been a flashpoint in the water politics of the region and a driving force behind regulation and river restoration projects. Nearly five years ago – around the same time the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) declared coho to be "functionally extinct" in the Shasta River – the county learned of a process called eyed-egg injection and decided to lobby fish and wildlife agencies for permission to try the technique on the Shasta.
Eyed-egg injection is a process by which salmon eggs are incubated for several months in a hatchery (or other controlled setting) until the eggs begin to develop an eye – an indicator that the egg is within a few weeks of becoming a free swimming fish – and then taken to a stream and planted under gravel in the natural streambed where it will finish its development. The process was pioneered by fisheries biologists in Alaska as a method to help rebuild decimated fish populations, and has shown relatively high success rates there.
Salmon hatcheries have a long history on the west coast and a substantial impact on the genetics of its salmon populations. Conventional hatchery operations collect eggs and milt from returning hatchery fish, fertilize and incubate the eggs, then raise the juvenile fish in tanks or raceways until they are nearly ready to migrate downstream to the ocean which, for coho, takes nearly a year. Many biologists have alleged that this process not only concentrates a fish population's gene pool, eliminating healthy genetic diversity, but also robs the juveniles of survival skills necessary in the wild.
Proponents of eyed-egg injection say the technique retains the benefits of higher egg hatch rates through controlled incubation while allowing nature to play a vital role in gene and behavior selection – resulting in a stronger fish with higher odds of returning to natural streams to produce self-sustaining populations, provided that the in-stream habitat can support them.
Paul Merz, a veteran commercial salmon fisherman based in Coos Bay along with Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) biologist Gary Vanderhoe began planting eyed eggs in Coos Bay tributaries for the first time this year. The project is one of many being undertaken as part of ODFW's Salmon and Trout Enhancement Program (STEP), which has utilized volunteer efforts to bolster the agency's salmonid restoration efforts across the state since 1981. Merz has been a volunteer participant in the program since the beginning. As a fisherman who's livelihood depends on healthy salmon runs, he has chosen to take a hands-on approach to improving west coast salmon populations.
Merz says he has been in contact with officials in Siskiyou County for nearly five years and has made at least five visits to the county to collaborate on the local salmon supplementation efforts. After all, Merz says between 40 and 80 percent of the salmon harvest off the central Oregon coast is made up of fish from northern California rivers. He also worked on an effort a few years ago to implement an eyed-egg injection project for spring Chinook on Siskiyou County's Salmon River. That project was ultimately denied by state and federal biologists.
Current county efforts to implement the procedure on the Shasta River appear to have a better chance of acceptance by biologist and regulators. CDFW Director Charlton Bonham recently told the Daily News that he is impressed by the county's broad supplementation partnership with The Nature Conservancy, California Trout, the Siskiyou County Farm Bureau and the Shasta Valley Resource Conservation District. Bonham said the coalition's level of cooperation has given him hope that supplementation in the Shasta River can work.
In addition, the same coalition organized the Upper Klamath River Coho Salmon Workshop in February of 2012. The event held in Yreka brought together more than 50 prominent fisheries biologists, geneticists and restorationists to explore the idea of coho supplementation in the Shasta River and the upper Klamath. During the workshop's closing discussion, virtually all members of the panel agreed that – based on the imminent threat of complete extirpation of coho on the Shasta River – a supplementation program there would be justified.
While eyed-egg injection is only one method of salmon supplementation, Siskiyou County officials say they find it appealing because of its relatively low cost, simplicity of implementation and high rate of effectiveness in Alaska.
Planting the eggs
Kobseff and Costales began their visit to Coos Bay at the Noble Creek Hatchery where Merz explained how eggs were taken from wild coho, fertilized and then incubated. Merz and Vanderhoe then extracted the eggs from the hatch box where they had been incubating and placed them in a small cooler for travel to the injection sites.
Three miles from the hatchery, on Catching Slough, Costales volunteered to shoulder the gas powered backpack pump equipped with an intake hose to draw water from the creek, and an output hose connected to a length of metal pipe, open on one end, with a funnel on the other. The apparatus serves the dual purposes of pumping water into the streambed to blast out excess sand and sediment while acting as a funnel to direct the eggs 12 inches deep into the gravel. Kobseff carried the hoses and Merz carried the cooler full of 6,500 potential coho salmon while the crew hiked a mile upstream to find the best stretches of streambed.
When a potential site with suitable gravel was selected, the lower end of the metal pipe was worked down into the gravel while the backpack pump forced water into the streambed pushing the fine grain sediments out of the streambed, leaving the larger gravel in place. Once an area of approximately two feet in diameter had been cleaned of fine sediment, the bottom end of the pipe was inserted approximately 12 inches into the cleaned gravel. The pump was then shut off and salmon eggs were poured into the top funneled end of the pipe and directed down into the streambed. After the eggs had been planted, the crew used their hands to gather additional clean gravel and piled it lightly on top of the man-made redd (salmon nest) to provide additional protection for the eggs.
After the last batch of eggs was injected into the streambed the crew congratulated each other and expressed their hopes for the success of what they'd done. Merz said, because this is the first time this process has been used in Oregon, the only way to know the success rate of the project will be to look for the returning fish in two or three years when they will hopefully return to spawn.
Until then, Siskiyou County officials will be keeping their fingers crossed while they continue to lay the groundwork for their own goal of planting coho eggs in the Shasta River and hopefully, eventually, restoring healthy populations of the fish to Siskiyou County.