Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Native Steelhead spawning comes to a close

After fertilizing hundreds of thousands of native Elwha steelhead we are done for this year. This has been a very fun and interesting project to be on. It is far from over because the Lower Elwha Kallam hatchery has many eggs to incubate and lots of fry to feed and move around as they grow. We have hundreds of fry outside in the raceways and many eggs in the incubation room. Before the end of summer, (I think) we will be weighing, measuring, taking a fin clips, and PIT tagging the fish who are big enough. We will basically start the process over again of genetics and family so in 4-5 years we can spawn these guys.

Another thing we will be out doing soon is pumping redds for more recruitment in our native steelhead recovery program. Redd pumping is one of my favorite things to do. It is like opening a present we are wondering how many little steelies we will get and what stage of development.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Even more spawning


With the Hood Canal bridge closure I will the one who runs the database and decides who is spawned with who. It shouldn't be that hard to mess up I just have to make sure that all the males are different families from each other as well as the female. We are spawning what looks to be our last batch of females tomorrow :(
We have also been able to see the fruits of our labor, the steeelhead fry that we bread a couple of months ago were put out in the raceways!

Melanie and I got to present this project along with our fellow REUers at ONP's perspectives program last Tuesday night. It went really well and I am glad that is over!

The picture is one of our handsome sperm donors!

Monday, May 4, 2009

Still spawning

Every Tuesday is spent down at LEKT spawning steelhead native to the Elwha River. It is been a big success because we have many hundreds of hatched eggs. This means we are doing something right! The NOAA crew makes the trip up every week as well because we have implemented a little side study to see if par marks are heritable. The adults that we are spawning had their par marks counted when they were smolts along with a picture. The average number is around 8 but there are some with 11 so we are coducting some special matings to see if this is inheritible. It will be interesting to see in 5 months when we count par marks what we can deduct.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Still spawning

Spawning of the ESA listed Elwha steelhead is still the main priority down at the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. So far we have fertilized over 51,000 eggs and we have some hatching from our first spawning. It is so cool being able to visualize the fruits of our labor! We are re-plenishing our native stock for future generations to enjoy.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Steelhead Spawning

This is a follow-up on the ongoing Steelhead recolonization project for the Elwha River. Many agencies are partaking in this event NOAA, Lower Elwha Tribe, and REUers. Last Tuesday was a very exciting day down at the Lower Elwha fish hatchery. The first group of native Elwha Steelhead (4 year olds) who were pumped from redds (in the river) and transported to the hatchery where they have been reared were ready to be spawned. The genetics (fin clip) have been done on these fish when they were PIT tagged, when they were approximately 6 months old. Gary Winans from NOAA is heading up the genetics and he has a very large data base of the families these Steelhead belong to as well as gender. The genetics allow us to make sure we are not breeding close relatives together.
The fish were captured out of their tanks, scanned for tag number so we knew what family they belonged to, if the fish was female then she was killed (they die after spawning in the wild) her eggs were extracted and put into 3 different tubs. The males were put into a tank with anesthetize (they get live to give semen once more) so we could milk the semen out. The semen was collected in baggies, oxygen was added to preserve viability, once we had semen from 3 males we mixed semen from one male into each tub of eggs. Water was added to aid the fertilization process then we mixed all of them together strained the eggs then added them to a brooder. The water in the brooder had iodine added to it to protect the eggs from bacteria. The iodine was rinsed out after a short amount time and now we are all waiting to see if our spawning was a success.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Podcast

I didn't realize I could type the same time I posted my podcast so here is my podcast on the first project I did as an REU student. There are some mess ups but I seemed to mess in everyone. Practice makes perfect right?