08-08-2022, 01:33 PM
(08-06-2022, 11:12 PM)doitall5000 Wrote: I have heard that a new strain of kokanee that spawns in the lake have been planted - maybe that strain was expected to have better natural recruitment and thus make up the difference.
I read that in Canada they use this strain. It lives longer and grows bigger.! I'm all in favor. I also would live to see king salmon in stead of cutthroat. We can dream can't we?
Hi Everyone, my name is Randy Oplinger and I am the Coldwater Sportfish Coordinator with the DWR. I know that you contacted Chris Penne about this thread. Chris is taking some well deserved time off and he asked me to respond to this thread.
All of you are asking some good questions about our management of kokanee. There is a lot that goes into how we stock kokanee. We have two kokanee egg sources in Utah, Strawberry and Flaming Gorge. We take the eggs from wild fish into our hatcheries, raise them over winter, and stock them out late April/early May of the following year. Our managers request a specific number of kokanee to be stocked into their waters. Our goal is to stock the number that our managers request but we often stock some number other than that requested number. That is because we try to take the right number of eggs to have the right number of kokanee to stock the following spring. In reality, we sometimes have disease issues that come up in our hatcheries that kill more fish than anticiapted that leads us to fall short on stocking our intended number. Conversely, sometimes fish survive better than anticipated and we end up with surplus fish. All of this leads to variation in the number of fish that are stocked.
I'll give you an example. The kokanee eggs that we collected fall 2020 had one of the lowest hatch rates on record. That left us short on having enough fish to meet our stocking requests in 2021 and we had to reduce stocking into a number of waters. We responded by taking more eggs in 2021 and then ended up with one our highest hatch rates on record and we ended up exceeding our stocking requests in 2022.
One thing that was mentioned in the thread was related to the cost of raising more kokanee. It turns out that we are egg limited with kokanee. We feel that we are taking as many eggs as possible out of Strawberry and Flaming Gorge and that we would harm these fisheries if we took more eggs. So we are not looking at taking more kokanee eggs at this time. This means that our stocking requests are pretty flat right now. It also means that if we want to stock more fish into one water then we have to cut fish from elsewhere. You noted a case in 2018 where we stocked fewer into Strawberry and put more into Jordanelle. That was the swap we made. We felt that we had more than an adequate number of kokanee in Strawberry and were still trying to get Jordanelle established. We wanted to put more into Jordanelle but to get there we needed to take some from somewhere else and our data indicated that Strawberry had a strong enough population that it could take a stocking cut.
I mentioned that we are egg limited for kokanee. We are beginning to look into a third egg source so we can begin taking more eggs. We have to do a bunch of disease testing before we can set up another egg source so it'll be a few years before that happens. We are currently in the process of evaluating new sources.
A lot of what is being mentioned in the thread deals with what is called a "stock-recruit relationship". In simple terms, that is the relationship between the number of fish we stock and the number of fish that are available for anglers to catch. In theory, if we want more fish to be available for anglers then we stock more fish. In reality, it doesn't work out as cleanly as that. Kokanee in particular are a species that has a poor relationship between the number of fish stocked and the number available for anglers. Other environmental factors (plankton, temperature, number of predators, etc.) play an important role in shaping the size of the population between we stock and 3-4 years later when the fish are large enough to be caught. So, I'd say that the association between the number of kokanee we stock and your fishing success 3-4 years later is weak. That association is stronger for other species.
There was something brought up in the thread about our kokanee strains. There is an early run kokanee salmon that typically (but not always) spawns in streams and a late run that typically (but not always) spawns in the lake itself. We primarily spawn and take early run eggs because they seem to work best for us in Utah. The only lake where we stock late run is Fish Lake. We made that decision because the largest creek feeding Fish Lake is pretty small and we didn't think it could support a large population of creek spawning early run fish so we went with the lake spawning late run there. With that said, we do stock a few early run into Fish Lake so people can see them spawn.
There was also something brought up about the sale of fish to other states. We don't sell fish to other states. We do trade fish from time to time. We only do that after our stocking requests are met. So, we make sure we are taking care of Utah before we send eggs to other states and when we do send eggs we are looking for something in return that benefits our anglers. We have sent kokanee eggs to New Mexico in recent years. They in return have sent us "super catchable" (14-16") rainbow trout. We don't raise rainbow trout to that size in our hatcheries because they take two years to raise and if we raised them we would have to significantly cut back on other stocking to free up the space to raise fish for two years (we normally keep fish for up to a year so we can cycle out our hatcheries annually).
Let me know if you have any other questions.