RIP Bruce of the Skok

Status: Dead
Speed: 0.95 mph
Distance: 89.72 miles

Jet (Skok) is still alive. Appears to be right at the Hood Canal Bridge. Looks like he has aborted no less than four attempts to swim past the bridge thus far. Must be some scary things happening near that bridge....

Sorry Stonefish!

Puget Pounder is now off Anderson Island after loitering in the Nisqually all week, seems to making a b-line towards the Narrows.

The bridge was not designed to allow fish to swim past it, if those fish swim in the upper 3 meters of the water column. Major design flaw!

Design flaws can be mitigated. Top ten solutions:

1. Fish friendly culverts could be installed in the bridge pontoons

2. Smolts could be trucked from the south side of the bridge to the north side.

3. Fish feeders could be retrofitted along the south side of the bridge. Fish could be fed to maturity; whereupon, they could return to their Hood Canal stream of origin.

4. Bridge span could be opened for fish passage twenty hours per day.
Car usage could be limited to an AM and PM peak travel period of two hours each.

5. A catch and release smolt fishery from the bridge could be established. Anglers would be required to "catch" on the south side of bridge, and "release" on the north side. Selective gear rules only. No license required.

6. WDFW could use seals, sea lions, and cormorants to train smolts to dive under the pontoons of the floating bridge.

7. In keeping with the core principle that no fish can be wasted, native and non native gillnetters could be allowed to set nets with one inch mesh off the south side of the bridge.

8. Escapement numbers for salmon/steelhead in Hood Canal rivers could be lowered.

9. The bridge could be demolished following a ruling favorable to fish by the Ninth Circuit Court.

10. ...............................................................(your call)

Sorry so many smolts are being lost so soon. It's fun following their progress.

Sometime over the weekend, in the vacinity of the Hood Canal Bridge, Jet went down. Another "Ghost" follower here.

RIP Puget Pounder. Dead At Tacoma Narrows over the weekend....


I have one friends fish, SalmonElla, who make great progress over the weekend and went from Mid hood canal all the way out to off Ediz Hook. Looks like she might make it.

Sgt. Snackbar, a NIsqually fish, has traveled 91 miles since release and hasn't made it past the Tacoma Narrows. What's up with three or four round trips between Anderson Island and the Narrows? Just along for the ride (tidal flow)? Or maybe he heard about his schoolmate Sushi who made it to the Devils Triangle (Gig Harbor, Pt. Defiance, south end of Vashon) and became steelhead sushi - probably for a seal.

Hang in there Snackbar; catch that strong outgoing at night and make a dash for more open waters.

Yeah, not too sure how I missed all of this. I would have been all over sponsoring a fish!

Bummer.

But yeah, organize a PP school for next year. I'm in!

Forty-eight fish released and now into day 8. Of the original 48 there have been 31 fatalities (65%) while 17 are reported as still alive (35%).

Not sure how that is broken out between Nisqually and Skok fish but losing roughly 2/3 of them in 8 days is appalling.

From a study validity standpoint does having the internal tracking device make those fish more susceptible to predation?

Of my family's 4 fish, 3 are now toast. All three Skok fish are dead, and the one Nisqually smolt is still alive, but hasn't moved too far.

Bubbles bit it the first day or two as previously reported, not far from the Skok mouth. The other two Skok fish made a lot of progress. The Skok bridge appears to have been a serious barrier to passage for one of them. Fishy McFishface bounced off the bridge twice, and once migrated all the way back to the Skok mouth! The third time got him past the bridge, and out Admiralty, but alas died in the eastern strait, near Smith Island. Fin-E-Us, the third Skok fish blew past the HC bridge on the first try, and made it as far as Port Angeles, where he died of unknown causes. Is there a way to know how?

The only survivor so far is Twitch from the Nisqually, who has only gone 59 miles at this point in the journey. He got past the Narrows bridge, went up Colvos, and is now lounging around the south side of Bainbridge Isl. Doesn't seem to be in a hurry.

Very interesting study, fun, interactive, and hopefully informative. Thanks all for reporting on your little dudes. . .it's been fun for all of us fishbadgers to play along,

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Well, the good news as of this morning's update is that Sgt.Snackbar remains alive.
The bad news is that he is now back to Anderson Island's Devil's Head having traveled over 100 miles and he is essentially right where he first hit salt water.

So, is he actively feeding and becoming bigger and stronger before venturing further north and out to the ocean? Or is he simply a low achiever on an extended "three day cruise" subjecting himself to additional risks as his peers leave him behind?

The way this is going Snacky will still be hanging out waiting for a Tee Time at Chambers Bay when LLTK ends its program and reports.

Not sure how I will handle not knowing.......

These tags have been implanted in steelhead smolts for more than a decade. Plus a wide variety of other salmonids and fish.

There is no way that I know of to assess the impact of the tags because you can't monitor the non-tagged fish in the same way. At least some of the fish have been recovered as adults with the tag still in.

Lots of searun cutthroat and anadromous native char have been tagged and monitored through the sound.

One of the first surprises I saw with the results was the loss of migrants all over the place, for all species. The rate of loss, per km migrated, was highest for the shortest migration. That is, early in the migration they get hammered.

Long time ago, we clipped coho, steelhead, and rainbow as they left a small lake on their way to sea. Then, recaptured them 5km downstream. Lost about 10% or more in that short trip.

While Sgt. Snackbar is reportedly still alive his travel history appears to have another possible story line......that is, dead and flotsam moving back and forth with the tide.

That raises a question as to how smolt are determined to be dead?

And does the transmitter implanted in an eaten smolt continue to be recorded by the sensors? If so, does that give some hint as to the identity of the predator?

The tags broadcast as long as the battery lasts. They have been recorded in Great Blue Heron, for example. A smolt is "dead" when it does not pass the next downstream line of receivers. In some cases, they can get by one line and are recorded at the next. Plus, a smolt may decide to remain in FW for another year. Battery dies, it survives and smolts, but would likely be considered a mort from the year before.

As with all stuff biological, you need years of data, consistently collected, to detect trends. This "one year of data and we have what we need" does save money but is stupid.

No doubt that more data using the same processes provides for better analysis over time. That said, even first year data has some value in evaluating a hypothesis such as in this case - huge early mortality.

The real questions will be what are the primary causes and what, if anything, can/will be done to mitigate them (biologically and socially/politically)?

Huge early mortality compared to what? That is the question. We know that lots of steelhead smolts die. We don't know what the "old" situation was because we didn't measure it.

The creek I worked on, where we trapped and marked all smolts and adults, looked like it could produce 1500 steelhead smolts. The stream looked like about 100 spawners filled the rearing capacity. 100/1500= 6.67% smolt to adult survival to first return. Or, put another way, 93.3% post-smolting mortality.

We also observed that less than half the adults coming back had been marked as smolts. While some could have been from below the trap, a lot had to be strays. Then, add in repeat spawners. In many places in the steelhead's range you get 20-30-50-even 90% repeats. All the repeats lower the smolt to first spawn survival below the 6.67% from above.

So, based on what I have seen in steelhead coastwide, the loss of more than half the smolts before they hit Bonilla-Tatoosh; even the loss of 2/3 or more, does tell me that there is a big problem in the Sound.

Maybe there is, but in other parts of the range they seem to cope well with what have to be low marine survivals.

Would the quick death in the salt, with little meandering lean towards a predation problem? Would the ingestion lead to a quick battery death as compared to death on the bottom and a slower consumption by scavengers? I, also, would love to know what we can find out about the deaths, as that should reveal a ton of information.

They die just as fast is freshwater. It is possible, and probably has been done, to look for the tags on seal haulouts, places where birds like cormorants defecate.

Quick death in the salt could simply be response to salt; they had issues. I think the assumption, though, is that losses are primarily predation.

On the stream I mentioned the loss could be explained by one or two Great Blue Heron or a River Otter. So, trying to find the one predator might be hard.

In Oregon, they did document that a huge chunk of steelhead smolt loss in a bay occurred around a seal/cormorant congregation site. They were alive upstream of it, not present below.

As of today, a whopping 6% of the tagged smolts are still swimming. Maybe there is a problem here....