Urgently trying to help an endangered species devastated by drought, biologists hauled 40,000 eggs to the McCloud River this year, then brought the young fish back again to migrate. So far, it’s gone well.
They came in two batches of 20,000 – the first by truck on a bumpy, 80-mile ride. A helicopter delivered the second clutch. “We wanted to make sure the transportation phase went smoothly,” Johnson said.
The scientists wanted the fish to spend time in McCloud, both to utilize its invertebrate food sources and to undergo the olfactory imprinting process that enables migrating adult salmon to find their birth streams years later. Indeed, it is this process that gives salmon their remarkable homing powers and would truly make these fish McCloud River salmon.
To improve the program’s effectiveness, scientists are now addressing some unanswered questions from the experiment., a biologist with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, wants to know how many of the salmon released at the incubation site made it as far downstream as the fish trap array. This will reveal the survival rate of the released fish and help Johnson and her colleagues better understand the quality of the McCloud’s habitat.
“If you can have such highly productive, good-growth habitat so high in the system, it starts the fish off in such a strong condition,” she said. However, it’s likely that the McCloud effort of last summer will develop in years ahead into a full-fledged salmon reintroduction program.
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