Fun with baby Coho in Fort Bragg

Mooch, Sean is hiring & I'm applying.  You should apply too, then we can work together!?!?

True!  Apply soon, I am getting LOTS of apps.  We "dope" our fish w/ Alka Seltzer as MS222 has issues with releasing the fish.  A lot of other folks have switched to clove oil and had very good success with it.

A lot of other folks have switched to clove oil and had very good success with it.

Thats It, clove oil.   

I just don't want to publish the chemical name of the "dope water" in public.  If you really want to know, you may ask by PM.

OMG, it really IS dope! 

Wow,  I haven't checked the board in a while and seen all these posts about our screw trap.  Thanks a bunch for the interest and thanks to Matt for posting it.

Here's some information on what we're doing, although Matt's done a great reporting job already:

The trap is a 5 foot diameter rotary screw trap, which is the smallest made.  Bigger ones go to 10 ft.  Due to the flashy nature or these small coastal watersheds, our fyke net trapping methods were a complete washout (literally in high flows). So we spent the bucks and got a screw trap, which runs on stream flow and can be used in big water.  The problem is during low flows there's not enough stream power to run the trap.  Consequently, we've had to motorize it for low flows, which is a real pain in the ass as we're always lugging around banks of RV batteries.  Which is also why I always have at least one young gorilla on my crew.

The fish dope is indeed MS 222.  We insert at least 5000 PIT tags a year, so fish mortality is a real concern for us.  We've found that MS is the most controllable anesthetic for fish surgeries, both in terms of maintaining the proper dosage and being able to observe specific levels of anesthesia.  To much of any of the anesthetics will kill.  We randomly select, over the course of the sampling season, about 1000 fish and hold them for 2 week periods to  determine any longer term mortality.  Last season out of about 900 fish held, we had zero morts.  As a reward to my crew for their awesome dedication to surgical duty, I got them properly anesthetized, but not with MS 222.  We used alcohol for that.

Overall, here's the gist of what we do:  This is a full life history study of Coho and steelhead in Pudding Creek.  During the spawning season we count fish at the ladder in the Pudding Ck dam and concurrently conduct spawning (redd) surveys throughout the stream.  We then statically relate redd counts with fish numbers to determine fish per redd.  This fish/redd metric is then applied to other streams in the region to determine spawning populations where spawning surveys are possible but harder ladder counts are not.

During spring we trap the outmigrating smolts in the screw trap as shown, and, using models developed by egghead statisticians a lot smarter than me, we come up with a population estimate for the fish going out.

In the summer we dive the creek using the hankin and reeves method (fish guys like Scwa will know what that is) and, again using the egghead models, determine the over-summer population of juveniles.

Using this strategy we have a good idea of how many fish are returning to spawn; how many fish are rearing in the stream during summer; and how many smolts are leaving the system for the ocean.

At this point we've just completed our first 3 year cycle (the coho cycle) and have revealed many interesting things about these fish.  But the most important thing we have observed is that right now the fish are not returning from the ocean.  Out of 35-40,000 smolts that left the watershed 2 years ago, only 110 adults returned.  That's what, like less than a 0.5 percent return rate, which ain't good.

Anyhow, if anyone wants to come on field trip when they're up in Fort Bragg, please feel free to PM me.  Weekends are better.

This is Dave, also known as pescadore when I'm logged in on my home computer.  Here's some pics from the Adult trapping:

Here's more pics:

Way cool. I'll stop cracking jokes now.

What's your guess on why so many salmon aren't returning?

Thanks for more info & pics, Dave!!!
I did send a question to your PM, so please check it out!

Great pics and info, Dave - thanks!   

Wow that Coho buck is really awesome!

Mooch, Sean is hiring & I'm applying.  You should apply too, then we can work together!?!?

True!  Apply soon, I am getting LOTS of apps.  We "dope" our fish w/ Alka Seltzer as MS222 has issues with releasing the fish.  A lot of other folks have switched to clove oil and had very good success with it.

Sean, forget about all the other applications and simply hire me and Noaoki....and you'll never regret it

Dave your screw trap setup is killer, that is dominating that creek...gotta have great efficiency.

Sean - thanks. When the creek is low we can go to 90% or more, when flows come up it drops quite a bit.  We avg about .45 to .5 for the season.  Yeah it's sweet.  Capture rate is 250 - 300 fish/day right now.  Do you still have that "extra" five foot trap around?

Dave, I WANT YOUR JOB!!! Hire me!!!

  Mooch, man you're making me nervous.....uh, I've got a family with a kid in college?  Actually, we're not down any bodies right now, but when we hire I'm looking for fishaholics with some common sense.  Sounds like you'd qualify.  Better be careful, you just may get what you wish for.  We get some folks that end up REALLY not liking it.  Squeezing fish and repetitious spawning surveys in the pouring, cold rain sucks after the novelty wears off.

What's your guess on why so many salmon aren't returning?

Salmon go to the ocean for one thing: to get big.  There's more food out there than in these small coastal stream networks.  Smolts on their way out of the system have tremendous metabolic requirements to offset the arduous physical changes they're going through to become marine fish.  They change everything, from the way they regulate salt content in their bodies to their physical structure and coloration.

When they hit the ocean in late spring they need food and lots of it.  The planktonic organisms on which they depend are in turn fueled by ocean upwelling, which in turn is fueled by those obnoxious northwest spring winds we receive at that time.

When this group of smolts went to sea, upwelling basically didn't happen.  The ocean around here was calm and clear all spring.  The results showed in juvenile rockfish counts, plankton counts, even marine bird mortalities.  I'm sure there are landbased problems that contribute, but the driver was clearly poor ocean productivity.

Dave

Dave, I WANT YOUR JOB!!! Hire me!!!
  Mooch, man you're making me nervous.....uh, I've got a family with a kid in college?  Actually, we're not down any bodies right now, but when we hire I'm looking for fishaholics with some common sense.  Sounds like you'd qualify.  Better be careful, you just may get what you wish for.  We get some folks that end up REALLY not liking it.  Squeezing fish and repetitious spawning surveys in the pouring, cold rain sucks after the novelty wears off.

Dave, I LIVE for that kind of stuff. PLEASE keep me in mind / Thanks!

Wow, very interesting. I guess I should check "Fish Talk" more often.

What other species do you catch in the trap?  It must produce lots of darters and sculpins, ect, too. 

What other species do you catch in the trap?  It must produce lots of darters and sculpins, ect, too. 

Smaller Northern California streams are surprisingly unproductive and do not support very many native fish species.  In Pudding Creek besides coho and steelhead we see 2 species of sculpin (coast range and prickly) and three spined sticklebacks.  I think that's about it.

There are other introduced species we see from time to time that are either the result of upstream migration from the pond at the dam (it was planted years ago), or escapees from upstream farm ponds.  Bass, sunnies and catfish.   Two or three species of lamprey are found in the adjacent, larger watersheds like the Noyo.  The Navarro has all the above mentioned plus a minnow called the Navarro roach.  As you move to the north, watersheds like the South fork of the Eel have all of the above plus chinnook, suckers, and everyone's favorite the pikeminnow (introduced).

In the Ten mile river watershed, which is a carbon copy of the Noyo, we've been seeing spawning sockeye in the middle of the summer.  This has happened now for three years in a row.  No one knows what to make of that.

We also see a bunch of crayfish, which, according to the literature, were all introduced here, including the California species that I can never remember the name.