Russian River in Ukiah 3-1-08

LOL.. no, its not all the fishes fault.  Like I said, hydrology and stream bed morpholgy and all that scientific stuff is a problem too.  However, I dont see how we are gonna change the course or flow of the russian river, but we can dang sure catch pike!

http://www.norcalkayakanglers.com/index.php/topic,11796.0.html

I'm just curious, how do people seem to know that squawfish numbers are up historically?  Where can I read that? 

Pikeminnow are predatory fish. They prey on other fish, and in the case of coastal watersheds, that means steelhead+salmon. And that is fine; just part of the natural cycle.
BUT...in watersheds that have been manipulated by man, they have a distinct advantage over salmonids === they are able to tollerate higher water temps than salmonids. These artificially increased temps are extremely bad for salmonids; while pikeminnow are unaffected. And they continue to proliferate like rabbits, uninhibited. So the balance is thrown off.
Warm water = less salmonids + more pikeminnow. The end result is an inbalanced fishery.

Knowing that they native to the Russian certainly does affect my decision to kill or not. But I think sigelvictory has an excellent point that the river itself is no longer representative of its native state. When I see them in the coastal watesheds around here, on the Central Coast, it makes me sick to my stomach. I 'might' intentionally catch as many as possible and 'maybe' throw them on the bank. Like in the Arroyo Seco River (the main spawning tributary to the Salinas River), there are so many of them that is is disgusting.
And, no it is not their fault. It is the fault of those who dewatered the river. Kinda like "Don't hate the player; hate the game." Right? But as a licensed angler I have the right to take a fish, and I will continue to exercise that right as I see fit. If that means taking a bunch of pikeminnows home for fertilizer, then so be it.

PK

yeah, you have right to take them (I don't think no limits on them & you can even spearfish them in some freshwater...) so I don't argue there, but yes, please don't be wasteful...  If you're using them for your precious garden then that's fine...  Fertilizing the Russian river's redwoods!? maybe...
but as bluefin said...

Pikeminnow are native to the Sacramento and the Russian.  If salmonid populations were normal, pikeminnow wouldn't be "hurting" salmonid populations.  Believe me, fisherman killing a pikeminnow here and there isn't going to get rid of them anyway.  Getting rid of one native species to help another just doesn't seem right.  Just like killing suckers on the Russian when steelhead fishing.  Has anyone ever thought about salmonids using juvenile suckers as a prey source.  In the summer and fall you can see clouds of baby suckers in the mainstem and tributaries.  For that matter, how about juvenile pikeminnow which also spawn with large amounts of offspring.

Pikeminnows get eating by salmonids when they're little (they're minnow family for the sake)...
& if you're going to blame pikeminnows for predation of salmoids... how about striper...  stripers are highly fish-eater then pikeminnows (pikeminnows are mix-eaters).
salmonid frys migrate at night to down stream.  I think they adapted to avoid the native visual predators like pikeminnows & their own kind, but who hunts at night?
don't get me wrong, I love stripers.  I highly prefer stripers over pikeminnows anyday since they're much prettier.
but I really don't think can't blame only on pikeminnows...  so please don't just waste them...

Like I said earlier, Squawfish are certainly not exclusively to blame, and maybe I shouldnt say that their numbers are up, but that is just my experience.  I will sometimes dive for crayfish in the river, and pike are literally everywhere.  I have had them literally come up and try to steal crayfish out of my hand!  They are brazen, aggressive predators.  But the combination of factors that I have mentioned, and that Sin Coast reiterated so well... have undeniably forced the species into closer contact with one another than in years past.  Whether the number of salmonids and pike are up or down, or one is up and the other is down, or the other way around, is almost irrelevant.  The forced competition for space maybe the real issue.  But, as has been pointed out, the pike arent going anyway, no matter how many are killed: THE SAME CANNOT BE SAID FOR SALMON AND STEELHEAD!

As far as the moral issue of killing one species for the sake of another, its kinds like the old thing with dolphins getting caught and killed in tuna nets... everyone crys for the dolphin, but no one cares about the tuna.  I am ok with crying for the steelhead, and squawfish be damned.  Does that make sense?

Wow, I learn something new every day. I didn't realize these fish were Russian natives. Thanks for the info Sean.

Nice to know that learning still happens in this day and age even at the highest levels of skilled angler,  .

I am with bluefin17 and naoaki on their attitudes. thanks for taking the time to state those ethics.

killing for killings sake, trash fish or not, is really something that deserves some hard thought.

J

The reason I asked,"How do people know if squawfish populations are up?" was that I fear people think they are assuming they are up historically because they heard it from somewhere else (another fisherman) or assume it to be true because of the way the river has been changed.  Well I'm a biologist on the Russian River and I'm well aware that I don't know everything there is to know about this river, but one thing I do know is that the Russian River never had much snowmelt to cool the river, so it probably has always been warmer than most northcoast rivers in the summer.  Another thing is that pikeminnow and sucker are spring spawners.  They spawn just after steelhead do, providing juvenile steelhead with a huge foodsource, so think about that next time you see someone throwing one on the bank because they are a "trash" fish.  Sometimes when I walking the creek or the mainstem in early summer you can see clouds of pikeminnow and sucker juveniles.  The Russian River is probably the most unique river on the northcoast and the most imperiled.  Little by little its getting better, but throwing away native fish to "restore the balance" just is going to help anything.

Thanks Joe

Bluefin, the fact that you do this sort of thing for a living tells me I am out of my league, and I'm not about to argue with you.  Like I've said, I'm not advocating anything here.  Mass genocide is not the answer.  I think this is the sort of conversation that comes from people who have watched a fishery degrade over time and are just pissed off about it.  It all seems to start and end with the crappy management of the water.  Just look at Lake Mendocino going damn near dry every year.  (well, that and my hatred of squawfish derived from my experience with lake pillsbury)  Maybe instead of throwing the fish on the bank, we should throw the vineyard owners in the river!

Well something to perk you up about the steelhead fishery.  So far we are seeing a pretty good steelhead run in a tributary I work in.  Just about 75 redds in the system and that doesn't include 2 tributaries.  I'll post final numbers when were done in a couple weeks, if they stop coming in.

we should throw the vineyard owners in the river!

Not saying I love Vineyards owners(well maybe a few) but they are just filling a demand that we create as are the people that supply water to us.

Indeed, in the spring the steelhead smolts, and the Chinook in particular cough up tons of cyprinid larvae...its give and take.

FYI-DFG thought that there was an overabundance of "rough fish" in the Russian in the 60s and 50s...before dams.  The poisoned huge stretches of major tribs and the mainstem.  They killed WAY more salmonids than cyprids, and did nothing to promote the long-term abundance of salmonids in the basin. 

Yep, Sacramento Pikemonnow aka Squawfish, and yes salmonoids feed on them.

I ate one...  once.

Leave it to government to make bad situations worse... Mike, I know what your saying, we are all part of the problem...  There always seems to be more problems than answers.  Hey Bluefin, do you ever do any research on Pieta?  I spent a lot of time splashing around in that creek as a kid... My uncle owned a large stretch of land adjacent to it... pretty little creek.

I caught one of those 3 yrs back while on the McCloud river arm of Shasta.  We were all the way up into the river as far I was able to get with my little 12' (About 50yds short of the house up there on the left) Anchored and throwing a roostertail into the current, it hit hard! I though I had a huge trout on until I got it up to the boat and netted it. was about 18 to 20inches.
 WTF is this? though a moment and realized what it was.  It experienced the sensation of flight and a crash landing on the bank.


Troy