Coho at Pudding Creek - Pics

Wow, Thanks for the pics and story behind them, good to see you're alive and well.  Looking forward to more of your quality posts.

Nice photos and story and great to hear they're headed in the right direction. Very curious so hope you don't mind a few questions. So if I'm getting this right you guys are tagging at a ladder and then will look for their carcasses up river post spawn. What kind of info will you be looking for?

Z

Z,

This study is a cooperative effort between the local timber company and the CDF&G.  There has been a lot of stream restoration efforts in this area by many, including my company.  The irony is, however, that no one knows what the population is around here - other than it seems like it's getting worse.  So this effort is simply a method of counting fish.  The method for the entire study area (Usal to Garcia) is to randomly sample stream segments with spawning habitat and make redd counts.  Then we average the redd count and apply it to all the spawning habitat and come up with an estimate of the entire number of redds from Usal to Garcia.

However, knowing the number of redds on a landscape doesn't tell you how many fish there are.  Every year the number of fish per redd changes.  Sometimes females make more than one redd; sometimes there's more of one sex than another; and sometimes, because the weather is shitty, we don't observe too many redds.

So that's where the Pudding Creek Study fits in:  Because we have confidence in our fish counts at the dam, and we survey the entire stream once a week for redds, we can generate an estimate of fish per redd with high confidence.  We then apply this ratio to our redd count estimate on the entire landscape.......producing a hopefully accurate population estimate.  There are three of these "calibration stations" in our entire study.

To finally answer your question, those floy tags are applied at the dam and then re-observed during our weekly surveys of the entire steam network.  This is standard "Mark and Recapture," a staple of wildlife and fisheries biologists for nearly a century.  If you have, let's say, a small bass pond and you want to find out how many fish are in it.  You catch and tag ten fish, then release them back into the pond.  When you go back and randomly fish the pond a week later one in ten fish are tagged (let's say). That means that ten percent of the population is tagged and you released ten fish, so there are 100 fish in the pond.

So anyhow, sorry to go on, when someone asks about your job, I guess the natural tendency is to get long-winded.

Craig, Yoshi has a station at the corner of the fish processing area.  She sits there whenever there's fish and growls at every fish that goes by.  That's her job....fish growler.



Here she is on a spawning survey about 8 years ago.....Yoshi's the dog.  She knows how to work people.

Dave

Thanks especially for the long winded version (my job is toooo boring to discuss) but your post gives us laymen a good picture of the program, I think it's cool.

Thanks Dave. Not even long winded, very interesting job and you're doing a lot of good. Those fish are beautiful.

Z

You guys taking otoliths?

You guys taking otoliths?

Every year we want to, but the otters get to the carcasses before we do.......so we never do.  We don't sacrifice any fish otherwise.  I think the CDFG folks get a few now and then.

Awesome job on the reporting Dave! Keep up the good work brother

Wishing you and everyone a beautiful 2011!!

Gorgeous fish report! Thanks Dave and BTW, your reply to the questions was hardly long winded-it's fascinating. What a great project and job to have.

NICE. Fin-porn...woohoo!

She knows how to work people.

She knows how to work people.

See, I told you!  Man, I should rent that mutt out to single guys............total chick magnet.

Oh yea check this one out. Murderers row