Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Eagleye]

I found these egg incubators on Scotty's website.

http://www.scotty.com/fishing-gear-equipment/salmonid-incubator.htm

These seem like a good idea. They can provide increased spawning success and the natural selection will start as soon as the fry emerges.

[jon5hill]

I found these egg incubators on Scotty's website.

http://www.scotty.com/fishing-gear-equipment/salmonid-incubator.htm

These seem like a good idea. They can provide increased spawning success and the natural selection will start as soon as the fry emerges.

These things are fantastic, we used them in conjunction with our custom designed "rearing tray" to hold fish until the fry stage to maximize survival. Our results demonstrated higher egg to fry survival than even the best hatcheries. The added benefit is that olfactory imprinting occurs right away so these fish will be finely tuned to the site you decide to rear them in, rather than releasing naive fry into alien environments and hoping for the best. An additional benefit is that the fish are exposed to environmental variation, so their metabolism isn't held static by hatchery conditions. Instead, they are forced to adapt to the slightly changing environment (dissolved oxygen, pH, light levels for phototaxis, stream current direction, siltation, specific conductivity, silver ion bioavailability, temperature, salinity and so on..). This makes them stronger and more resilient to environmental variation during their out migration than hatchery fish, and they are well learned in regards to their environment. Dr. Vladimir Soukhatchev described this process during the most recent Salmon summit and said we should put these rearing trays in all streams to act as a "Marshall Plan" to save wild salmon populations. It's not entirely a bad idea to capture several brood fish, milk/egg them and then rear them in isolation from natural predators yet expose them to all the environmental conditions they should get used to anyways. I'm sure we would see a marked increase in returns as imprinting is thought to occur at a very young age. Most of the steelhead that return to the Vedder are delayed getting to the spawning beds because of this. They are released as fry/smolts (correct me if I'm wrong) into the lower sections of the river where their olfactory imprinting starts, and then when they return they are essentially lost when they travel any further up stream from the site where they were released, making them more available for the sport fishery.

What are your thoughts Eagleeye?

[Dave]

Good to read some forward thinking regarding how hatcheries and salmonid enhancement methods can and should change …. and happy you mentioned the Vedder, jon5hill.
I would fully support matrix spawning an undetermined number of  wild (or at least, unclipped ) Chilliwack River steelhead females with as many males as possible, and using these units in selected areas of the Chilliwack River (ie. low maintenance/stable water flow sites such as Centennial, Yukalup, Peach Channels etc, as well as the outlet of Chilliwack Lake, Foley Creek and other sites on the upper Chilliwack River.
IMO, poor spawning gravel quality, impeding egg to fry survival, is the limiting factor in wild steelhead production in the Chilliwack.  These units, as well as other technology already known but not employed, could definitely jump start declining diversity in salmonid populations in many BC rivers.