Joel Scruggs, Public Affairs Specialist, Bonneville Power Administration (off camera): Traditionally,
a fish hatchery is where fish eggs are artificially fertilized, hatched and raised. Then once
they become juveniles they’re released into the wild. At the Yakama Nation’s Salmon
hatchery in Prosser, Washington, they’re doing something else. Here, they’re rejuvenating
kelts, which are wild adult steelhead that have recently spawned.
Joe Blodgett, Fisheries Biologist, Yakama Nation: Steelhead have a unique lifecycle
where they don’t have to die after they spawn like a salmon does. So with the kelts,
they’ll drift back out and act like a giant smolt trying to go back out to the ocean.
You know, you can imaging the journey they had coming back from the ocean: fighting the
predators, the currents, and then spawning in the wild. When they’re drifting back
out to the ocean there’s no energy left in them. So we intercept them after they spawn,
hold them in our facility, recondition them, hope they get their eggs to regenerate and
then release them back into the system.
We saw these fish leaving the river system and knowing they don’t seem to be repeat
spawning. So how can we help them out? And rather than put another hatchery setting in
like you do for salmon, we’re using their unique lifecycle.
Yeah, so we intercept them. We give them a safe environment. We treat them for any type
of diseases; give them some antibiotics and feed, and then let them go back out and do
their thing.
(Sounds from weighing and measuring process)
We’ll put a PIT (passive integrated transponder) tag in all of our steelhead that we’re working
on today just to track and to get some evaluation on how they’re doing. This is just a way
to name the fish. And when the fish first comes in we’ll do meristics. We’ll do
some lengths and weights and scale samples; DNA samples. And with this tag we can link
it back to the original fish. So even with its offspring we’ll be able to go through
and say this fish produced this many fish here. It’s a valuable tool to have for monitoring
the success of our programs.
Joel Scruggs: Steelhead are different than salmon. They’re actually a sea run rainbow
trout, so they can repeat spawn like freshwater trout. This characteristic is called iteroparity,
but unfortunately there aren’t many kelts left in the Columbia River Basin. The steelhead
populations that originate above Bonneville Dam are listed under the Endangered Species
Act. The historical numbers of downstream migrating kelts are not well documented, but
current rates show high mortality, due to flows, pollution and fish passage.
Joe Blodgett: The bottom line is the river has changed. The flows have changed. The fish
passages were designed for smaller fish, not a big two-foot smolt.
Doug Hatch, Senior Scientist, Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission: Only 1.5 percent
of the spawning population is made of these repeat spawners. We’re trying to come up
with any kind of novel approach to restoration that would rebuild populations. If we could
boost that to 20 or 30 percent then we’ve made a sizeable increase to the population.
Joel Scruggs: The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission in collaboration with the
Yakima/Klickitat Fisheries Project has been reconditioning kelts from the Yakima River
since 1999 and so far the results are encouraging.
Joe Blodgett: We’ve actually radio-tagged some of the fish and videotaped them spawning
in the wild. And that’s exciting. And with the PIT tags, we’ve had them come back into
our system for a third time. They’ve gone up and spawned a second time and they’ve
come back through. So we’re seeing evidence that it’s happening. Now we’re going to
try and see how viable the eggs are and we’re doing that with artificial spawning channels
and with more radio tags.
Joel Scruggs: After six to eight months of nurturing, feeding and growing these refreshed
kelts are ready to be released back into the wild.
Joe Blodgett: When we release them they look they’re fresh fish out of the ocean. So
they’re big and they’re bright and they’re full of eggs.
(Sounds from truck releasing kelts back into the river)
They’ll go back into the tributaries in another couple months and start spawning.
After that they’ll drift back out like smolts and we’ll see them March through June back
in our system again, hopefully ready to go through another cycle.
Doug Hatch: Had we not intervened those fish would have died. They would have perished.
Instead, a good number of them are going to go back upstream and spawn again.
Joe Blodgett: With this we allow the fish to go back out and spawn in their own habitat,
pick their own mates, pick their own areas and spawn without interfering with their genetic
makeup. I think this tool will be around for awhile to help with the steelhead population.