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!

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.