Photograph: Mark Hereford, ODFW
Recent news of king salmon spawning within the higher Klamath River Basin was unimaginable, particularly with how not too long ago all 4 dams have been eliminated. As a refresher, “in line with the Oregon Division of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW), at the very least one chinook salmon has been noticed in a Klamath River tributary this 12 months. That’s the primary salmon to be seen in Oregon’s aspect of the Klamath River Basin since 1912, and that fish was about 230 river miles from the Pacific Ocean.”
Whereas that’s actually a monumental feat, it additionally brings up one other query—what’s subsequent for the salmon within the Klamath?
Juliet Grable, writing in Hatch Journal, offered us with some solutions.
“The California Division of Fish and Wildlife has put in ‘video weirs’ to seize photographs of salmon in key tributaries; the company additionally has crews on the bottom surveying spawning salmon,” Grable writes. “Additionally in California, the nonprofit Cal Trout has put in a sonar monitoring station simply above the previous Iron Gate dam. Cal Trout can be main a undertaking to pattern fish utilizing particular nets close to the Iron Gate dam web site; these hands-on surveys will present a week-by-week snapshot of fish within the river. The crew are becoming a few of these fish with radio tags and passive built-in transponders, or PIT tags, to allow them to observe them as they transfer upstream.”
It’s a giant operation, however it’s value it for all of the perception we’ll achieve on not solely salmon, however steelhead, as they transfer again into reaches of the Klamath which have been out of attain for over a century. Fisheries managers may even get to see the fruits of their labors when releasing hatchery chinook salmon, as effectively. Whereas hatchery salmon aren’t as robust as wild fish, they may assist bolster wild populations for the foreseeable future.
Grable’s in-depth reporting is value studying, which you are able to do here.
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