Raising salmon in an RSI

[clamchucker]

One of my grandchildren was doing a school project and sent me this link. I found it interesting and thought to pass it on to you folks.



Raising Salmon in an RSI


Volunteer Salmon Egg / Fry Rearing. This article will try to document one man's effort to help mother nature. His name is Errol Anderson. He is running a Remote Site Incubator (RSI) & has been securing eyed Coho salmon eggs from the Washington State Salmon hatchery at Bingham Creek off the Satsop River in Western Washington since 1983. The year 2009 saw a change & the eggs being supplied by the Washington State Salmon hatchery on the Skookumchuck River. These are both tributaries of the Chehalis River.

He took over the project that was being ended by another person, & transferred the location to his area. The first 4 years he took 50,000 eggs each year. After that, he increased the number of RSI boxes to 3 & the quantity was upped to 100,000 eggs. He is still operating the 3 the sites on the same creek, plus adding another to a small tributary, but has replaced the original & replacement plywood boxes as they deteriorated. In the late summer of 2006 he replaced 2 of the plywood boxes with plastic 300 gallon cattle watering tanks. In the fall of 2007 he added another plastic tank site in a small side creek.

Now that he is retired, he a neighbor & a cousin watch over each of his egg boxes daily (sometimes 3 times a day when the water is up & muddy) during the incubation period to be sure there is no water problems when they are in the process of hatching out.

Initially when he saw that the returning salmon to the Deep Creek drainage in Lewis County were declining he wanted to see that they did not become a thing of the past. Some of this was because of beaver dams, & or low water flow in the creek at the wrong time for salmon to pass upstream. He was born & raised in this area & can remember years past when the upper reaches of this creek had many salmon spawning there around Thanksgiving time.

Over the years he has improved the the habitat, created riffles & better spawning areas & generally helped mother nature in stream restoration.

The Main Ingredient Needed : These eggs are obtained from returning Coho from the Bingham Creek salmon hatchery off the Satsop River, which is a tributary of the Chehalis River. Deep Creek is also a tributary of the Chehalis River, only a lot farther upstream. The hatchery will take an average of 2,800 eggs from each female Coho salmon. They are fertilized & left in the incubation trays until eyed up. Then they are hand sorted for dead or defective eggs. At this point Errol gets a call & transports them home to the egg boxes.

For any RSI to function the main need is to have enough of a flow of clean water from the middle of December for about 2 months to where the eggs hatch & then get large enough that they naturally move out by themselves into the smaller streams.

Incubation trays in the hatchery20,000 eyed eggs per trayInitial sorting dead eggs using salt solutionSorting out bad or dead eggs Determining weight of known number of eggsWeighing out 25,000 eggs

The eggs are usually procured by him from the hatchery about mid December, the 13th in the year 2005 & December 12th 2007. The initial process to get these eggs thru WDFW Fish Management is quite involved. It may even be near impossible for someone new to be able to start up a program like this in today's bureaucracy world.

Once the eggs are eyed up, & the phone call is made to come pick them up, the hatchery workers will transfer them from the incubation trays to tanks where running water just covers the eggs. As seen in the above 2 baskets, the front basket has been picked over & has had the dead or non-fertilized eggs removed, while the rear basket has not yet have not been picked over as evidenced by the lighter colored eggs.

Eggs going into wet burlap bagsSigning off100, 000 eggs loaded in wet burlap bags

They are transferred into wet burlap bags at the hatchery in preparation to transportation. At the eyed stage, they are not as susceptible to to handling, & can be removed from the water for a short period of time, but still need to be kept wet during the transportation to the egg boxes.

Enter The RSI Egg Boxes : In use, for the RSI boxes, the intake water enters the bottom of the above blue plastic tank that is full of washed gravel about the size of SMALL chicken eggs. This acts as a collection tank & primary filter. Here in the center picture below, he is pointing to the clean-out plug, which flushes the inlet line & back flushes the collection tank also. The outlet is on the top which then goes into the bottom of the main egg box. The second PVC pipe going down, feeds water to a second box if applicable.

The intake must have screening (shown below) to keep leaves & other debris or sediment from getting in & plugging up either the intake itself, or internally inside the boxes. There has to be enough fall in the creek to allow for enough pressure to guarantee flow enough to keep the eggs covered with fresh water. Two of his intakes are only 50' long, while another is 600'.

Protected water intakeInlet settlement tankOutlet of one of the old wooden egg boxes

Above are pictures of the actual old style wooden egg boxes. He has placed them in strategic locations where there is small streams off the main creek & yet on private property so as to avoid any chance of vandalism. A few minutes by vandals could ruin a whole year's returns. These original boxes were made from plywood, but he upgraded for the 2007 eggs with a new series being made from 8' 300 gallon oval plastic cattle watering troughs shown below.

In the center photo below his water intake line running upstream about 600' became plugged with silt, so the water into the box is now being pumped in by a electric sump pump shown hanging off a pole over the creek.

The old wooden tank systemThe new plastic tank system in the same location as the photo on the leftHere he is loading eggs in one of the new boxes

Inside the inlet bottom of the egg box, the main inlet line splits into 4 smaller 1/2" PVC lines that have hundreds of small holes drilled to dissipate the water over the whole egg box. The egg box is then also filled with washed river rock the same as the collection tank. It is filled with these rocks so that there is about 4" of flowing water over the rocks. On the outlet end of the egg box, these 4 PVC pipes extend out with caps placed on them. Here he can unscrew the caps, & again drain out any sediment. The other large cap in the center is only used for draining the tank when the hatching season is over.

You will notice that there are plywood covers over these egg boxes. The one thing the young fish do not like is lots of sunlight. plus these covers give a added measure of protection from predators, like Racoons.

[clamchucker]

Placing eggs into the boxFlushing any sediment out of the bottom of the rocks while the eggs are hatchingHatched eggs or alevin. Here the egg sacks are shown attached to the body, & soon will be heading into the gravel for another month

The water needs to have a steady flow over the eggs to insure they survive. If too much sediment gets into the box, it can smother the eggs. This sediment can be somewhat of a problem if the water is discolored as even his filtering & flushing may not take all the fine sediment out. If sediment to any degree settles over the unhatched eggs it then may be best to stir up this water above them & try to have the sediment float upwards & possibly out the overflow. In the upper right picture below the sediment is about maximum & still have the majority of the eggs survive. Jan 4th, most of the eggs are hatched with the red being the egg sack attached to the young fish body. When this picture was taken, about 80% of the eggs have hatched & have already moved down into the gravel. It will take about another 3 to 5 weeks before they consume the sack & move up out of the rocks & then migrate out of the box.

Emerging fry from the rocks

Lots of fry in catch barrel for relocation, & this number moved out just overnight
Possibly 5000 fry in 5 gallon bucket ready to be relocated into the upper creek

February 18th fry were observed emerging from the rocks in 2005, but not until the middle of March in 2007. The date of emergence was February 14th on one box & March 8th in another in 2008. Water temperature is the factor here & one of his sites typically is about a week ahead of the other. At this stage when they emerge, they are about 1 1/2" long. If he wants for all of these fry to go into the creek, he just lets them go out the overflow & into the creek on their own.

Move Fry To Better Rearing Areas : However if he wants to transport some of them to other locations above this site, he then captures them in a catch basin. The overflow from the rock egg box was ran into a cut off 50 gallon barrel which acts as a catch basin for when the fry voluntarily leave the box. In this 1/2 barrel there are many small holes drilled around the top, or lined with screen, about 3" down from the top. These holes let the overflow water (that carried the fry into the barrel) drain out but yet retain the fry. When there are enough fish to transfer into 5 galloon buckets, they are then taken by a pickup truck or 4 wheel drive quads to the upper reaches of the same creek where there are small beaver dams & holding areas for the fry to make their home for a while. Everything has to be ready & the distance to their new home can not be over a couple of miles as the quickness of getting them back into the water is paramount in that this many fry will use up the available oxygen rather quickly.

Filling the 3rd bucket with fry. Notice the 2 white buckets already full of fry.Dumping the fry into the upper part of the main creek to disperse the fish better

This small stream above the egg box area does not have many gravel locations to allow spawning to take place & or be very productive. But it is good raising water for the fry, once they are transferred there. There are cool alder shaded pools, beaver dams & excellent water for these fry to spend the next months in before heading for the saltwater.

Here are 2 paired up salmon going over a riffle below one egg boxThese 2 salmon are resting below a riffle, next to the bank in the brushA salmon above a riffle. Note all the sores on her top fins, tail & body

Returning Fish : The earliest we have seen returning salmon in the main creek was October 31 2009. There was just over 3" of rain fall in the preceding 10 days plus another 1 3/4" during the previous 2 weeks, which was enough to bring the fish in from the ocean & lower river. There was not really enough water in the side creeks where Errol has the egg boxes for the fish. Plus one side creek did not have enough water to guarantee egg survival at that time.

The first day salmon returned in 2005 was December 26th as shown in above LH picture after there had slightly over 5" of rain in the 8 days just prior. The picture in the middle was taken 2 days later with another 1" of rain pushing the water higher & muddier. The picture on the RH side was taken a year later. When there are rains enough to have enough water for the fish to return & spawn, it is many times higher & muddier than hoped for to take good pictures.

Prime spawning gravel on the head of the main creek, but not enough water at the right time of the year to allow fish to pass up to itOne lone soreback spawned out female left guarding her red in the center of the photo

The above LH picture was taken about Thanksgiving, but there had been no rain for some time & the creek was so low that if the fish were in the main river there was not enough water for passage to the upper section of the creek. These fish need a stream bed that has enough gravel for them to spawn in. If it is just mud or silt, even if they do spawn, the eggs will smother & die.

The RH picture was taken Jan 4th, with most all the fish spawned out & dead, with this one lone female left kind of guarding her red (the depression she dug with her tail where she deposited her eggs). She has a lot of whitish sores on her back & fins which about all you can distinguish her by.

Errol's home sits on the stream bank overlooking one of his egg boxes. The day he called & said the salmon were back, from his porch we counted about 10 salmon in the process of spawning in the 100 yard area next to his house. In these pictures, the red colored fish is the male. These fish appear to be in good shape as there are no worn tails or dorsal fins that can start decaying & turn whitish. However some of these pictures were taken 2 days later & the whitish fins have began to show. If there are more males than females, the males will fight over being able to fertilize the female's eggs.

The average return for his efforts may only result in 1 1/2% returning fish 3 years later. One year he stood on the porch of his house & watched 14 fish spawning in the small stream below next to the tank that they originated from. Other years only 3 fish were present that he saw. The situation is that many times the rain & therefore the water flows are not enough at the right time to allow returning salmon to migrate as far up the creek as his location. It is then hoped that these fish may find a place to spawn in the lower creek, although possibly not as desired as the upper smaller tributaries. This is one of his reasons to do this in that many years there has not been the rains at the right times for salmon migration to the most desirable spawning gravel, thus diminishing the percentage of later returning fish.

It takes about a month for the eggs to hatch & they then burry themselves down into the rock crevices, & live on the nutrients of their egg sacs. When they emerge from the rocks, they will be about 1 1/4" long. They then on their own will swim, or be carried out the overflow & into the small stream. If he wants to disperse these fry into a better rearing area upstream or downstream in the same stream, he can now catch some going out the overflow & plant them in his picked out locations.

These small Coho salmon will stay in the streams for another year, growing to about 6" long. They then migrate out to the ocean in the spring, where they tend to turn right & head toward Canadian & Alaskan waters. Usually 2 years after they enter salt water, they return to their home streams to mate. The female finds a gravel bar to her liking, scoops out a depression in the gravel with her tail & deposits her eggs in this hole, known as a red. When she lays her eggs, the male is always nearby (like side by side to her) & he fertilizes them as they lay in the red. When the process is over she covers the eggs with gravel. Many times the female will allow another male fertilize her eggs, just another mother natures methods of diversifying the gene pool. When there are no more eggs or sperm, both of the salmon will die. Their carcasses will decay & provide nutrients for water bugs or as food itself for the young fish after they hatch & enter the stream.

They can find their home stream by a very good sense of smell. They get imprinted by the water they grew up in & remember it's smell when they get ready to return. Some salmon can detect 1 part in 8 billion. Using this smell, they can find the same stream they originated from.

Errol spent time in a hospital the summer of 2005 which they finally diagnosed as rabbit fever & it looked bad for a week until they figured out what was going on. He had time to think about what he has done & realized that he is not invincible, so has now added another volunteer name (me) as a secondary person to carry on his legacy if & when he may get sick or old enough that he can not function, or may pass on. We fisherpersons owe a lot to the dedicated people who perform this type of work.

Plugged Culvert : During the late summer of 2006 Errol found a 5' corrugated steel culvert on logging road D1100 on a east fork of Deep Creek above his egg boxes that had been plugged almost completely by beavers during the summer. This has been a recurring situation where he has been able to manually remove the beaver sticks before. This time the beavers were persistent.

Inside of the culvert looking upstreamThe upstream side before removalThe same upstream side after removalLook at the rusty bottom which would have been the water flow level

After contacting the landowners, Port Blakey Timber Co. , WDNR & WDFW, the landowners brought in a excavator & a crew that removed this blockage just in time before the fall rains began. This blockage could have hampered some of his operation in that it would have blocked any chance of any of his possible returning salmon to migrate into this section of the creek & on to any possible upstream spawning gravel.

In another light about mid 1990s $500,000 was spent placing wood debris in the creek, fencing & rocking muddy roads to help protect the stream. Then a few years later about a mile upstream from this culvert a culvert was removed & replaced with a concrete/steel bridge for $60,000. The in about 2007 another larger culvert at the end of the county road was replaced with a concrete bridge for another $500,000.

Errol has taken it upon himself to be the guardian of the upper Deep Creek watershed. He stays on top of needs of this watershed & over the years has a stack of business cards for supervisors of most all of the management bodies involved. he is not afraid to contact them when the need arises.

The beavers were at it again during the summer of 2009 & the blockage had to be removed again.

[clamchucker]

Flood of 2007 : This major flood in the Chehalis basin was by some identified as a 500 year flood. (click here for link to article) How did it effect salmon in the system. Well not good. It may well have wiped out the 2007 Chinook spawning & the Coho is questionable. The 2006 flooding was not as bad, but again the fish took a hit.

Photos below are of log-jams in lower Bunker Creek with a before & after. Deep Creek & Bunker Creek merge about a mile above this log-jams & the main Chehalis River is less than 1/2 a mile below. The concern was that if this blockage is not removed, would the smolt be able to go downstream or the salmon trying to return, be able to get upstream thru it?
Washington Department of Natural Resources arranged for a contractor to clear this debris (03-05-08) at no charge to the landowner. This logjam was so solid that a large excavator walked itself across the logs from the LH (north) side to do the work on the RH bank, did it's work there, left enough debris to go back across & then did the final cleaning from the LH bank.
There was about 10 acres of woody debris up to 10' deep in a farming hay field immediately to the north of these photos. The landowner was leary of the WDNR proposal of clearing it & he would be left with the small sticks clean up, plus it appeared that he felt that he might be able to salvage enough logs to make a profit. He hired a logger & had this all removed, salvaging some logs & firewood, chopping the rest up into "Hog-Fuel" & had it hauled off. There were MANY small sticks that had to be picked up by hand off this field after the "loggers" finished. This was done by volunteers from a church organization. The land was then worked up & seeded back to hay.
I talked to this farmer in the early fall of 2009 & he indicated that they were currently plowing the whole field up again & would be reseeding it. He said the silt was so hard & the small debris still so bad that he would have been better off to have just let it lay & lost use of the land. The cleanup cost even though he salvaged some good old growth fir logs & firewood was not worth it in the long run because of the bad hay crop. And he was not sure how long it would take to build the land back up to where it would produce a profitable crop again.

Bunker Creek log jam in Sidorski's field after water recededBunker Creek, after log jam removal, photo taken from opposite side of creek as photo on left

Cold Weather, Winter of 2009 : The eggs were acquired November 21 of 2009 from the hatchery on the Skookumchuck River. Early December saw freezing weather with the temperatures at 10 to 13 degrees in the mornings of the 8th thru the 11th. This cold weather froze the intake water into one of the egg boxes. The ice was 1" thick on top of the egg box, but the water was not froze where the eggs were a 5 inches below that. Some eggs had hatched when I looked at them on the 11th, but the water was so cold that these Alevin stage fish characterized by the presence of a yolk sac attached, were so sluggish that they did not attempt to bury themselves into the rocks.

I looked at this one egg box again on the 17th after everything had thawed out. It appeared that all of the unhatched eggs & the 20% or so that had hatched into a Alevin stage but were so cold that they did not go down into the protective rocks had also died. We spent some time on the 18th cleaning the dead eggs which had already started to mold & deteriorate from the egg box. I was wrong, we did not loose them all, I managed to find 2 Alevin that were still alive, only to break the egg sac on one when I moved them to a secluded corner of the box.

There was enough flow in the 3 other egg boxes that these did not freeze solid, ice, some ice, but still a flow of water over the eggs. And upon inspection they came through just fine.

Here the intake, egg box & the outlet are frozen as indicated by the icicle off the end of the overflow & the whole small creek was frozen solid.

This photo taken 12-11-09, if you look close, you can see a few hatched eggs or Alevin with the egg sacs attached (the red colored ones) under the 1" of ice. The golden colored eggs are dead, but at this time the grayish-pink eggs are still alive.Here, taken 12-18-09 it is apparent that most all of the eggs & even the Alevin did not survive the cold spell. Now all the eggs are dead & the small whiteish Alevin are also dead. The fuzzy brown spots are mold on the dead eggs.

After we cleaned the box of most of the dead eggs, we contacted the Skookumchuck hatchery manager inquiring as to whether he might happen to have a few extra eggs that we could get. As luck would have it, he did & did get permission to replace those we lost due to the cold weather. We cleaned the tank again & received another 25,000 eggs on the 28th of December. Thank you Jim Dills & WDFW.
Now The Downside Of The Project : The actual number of returning fish are very few in relationship to the number raised. The time involved may even seen wasted as some years dismal returns showed back. We have not done a daily stream count during the normal spawning season, (& probably need to) but usually do a weekly observation other than the small tributary by his house which can be hourly. There is minimal spawning gravel in the main creek, possibly only 1/2 a mile at best which is mostly upstream on the main creek in a timber company land & behind a gate. Some years, like 2007 only 5 or 6 may be present while other years possibly 30 fish by the house. The fall of 2009 there was a lot of early water, yet not enough to really flood, so many fish made it back, estimates between what we saw & the neighbors did, were probably near 150 this year. When taken into account 100,000 were raised & released that retuning low number is really hard to believe.

There are other RSIs in the upper basin that I am aware of. One is on Dillinbaugh Creek southeast of Chehalis. Another project just ended on Stearns Creek when the operator was old enough that he could not carry on & his son had no interest in doing so. He could find no one who wanted to take over. This one was shared with a local high school & he had them do clipping of the outgoing fry. Another project is ongoing at the Onalaska High School, where the clipped fish are released into Carlisle Lake & the returning fish trapped at the weir there. A few years ago WDFW wanted Errol to finclip his fry, but with his limited holding area & if 20,000 fry emerge in one night plus our big clumsy fingers don't help in the clipping process (been there -done that). Then you look at the retuning numbers, yah for legal reasons, they should be, but is it really worth the effort?

Now why are the returns low? There are probably many reasons. One may well be the need for nutrient enhancement back in the small streams. We have done this at times, but there is only two hatcheries low down on the Chehalis system & getting carcasses from them, plus over an hours drive one way & at the high gas price? Another problem may well be predators. I have observed for the last few years in the spring at the mouth of the Dillinbaugh, into the Chehalis River, many cormorants roosting in the cottonwood trees there. This would be easy pickings for the young fry from that RSI just a few miles upstream from there. Also mergansers along the river during the summer have increased in numbers. Water quality does not appear to be an issue in that the dairy farmers all are required to have a manure lagoon as a holding area & can only pump it out onto the fields during good weather. Both the cities of Chehalis & Centralia have new state of art sewage treatment plants so that helps.

During the late Steelhead season, if using bait, it is not uncommon to catch out-migrating Coho smolt. However these encounters are small in that fishing access on the upper Chehalis is minimal, plus not many fishermen will come back for repeats of zero fish taken. It is not worth the time & effort when the Quinault tribe gillnets are in the lower river for a considerable length of time each fall & spring. Then with the 14" cutthroat minimum size limit in the Chehalis, with squawfish being the primary fish in the upper river, not much sport trout fishing is even done there anymore. Sorry kids you will just have to play video games.

I do not see stream enhancement as an issue in this particular watershed, as the creek sides in the middle section has had no logging for over 40 years & mostly large alder alongside the creek. The upper section has had some logging, but the creek has been preserved. Most culverts are large & usually kept open. Down trees & some small logjams & an occasional beaver dam are occasionally seen making prime rearing areas.

For those who see his release of unclipped hatchery fish as a detriment for sportfishing, in that they contribute to the uncatchable sport numbers, well all I can say is if you are willing to come out & help set up a holding / feeding tank & help finclip, we are more than willing to accept your generosity.

Frustration : I have sat on the WDFW Grays Harbor ad hoc advisory committee since it was formed in 2004. It is frustrating to see the number of salmon dwindling. Our unanimous concern/advise has for the most part been on ears where their hearing aids must have dead batteries. The projected 2008 returns look dismal. 2009 returns for Chinook were dismal in that no retention was allowed, while now the Coho were good, however possibly due to some of the RSIs not fin-clipping, the ratio of hatchery to natural was about 1 to 6. We all agree that there are probably no true wild fish anymore, so according to WDFW any returning unclipped fish is called a "Natural" .

We need to be heard & something needs to be done. Maybe with a new region 6 manager & new fish program manager, things have the appearance of looking up. I sincerely hope so.


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