A Summer’s STEP on the Columbia

Summer 2011, for me, was spent as a STEP (Student Temporary Employment Position) student working on the Hatchery Assessment Team with the USFWS’s Columbia River Fisheries Program Office. Just as any proper summer should, mine was filled with bush-whacking trail adventures, acquisition of new skills, technical difficulties (associated with our electronic equipment), challenges, rewards, and of course FISH!

My summer challenge was re-acquiring my “stream legs.” After nine months of classroom studies, keeping my waders from collecting their own stream water samples from the field each workday was a task in itself. Especially due to the unusual higher summer flows and lower water visibility – overall concealing inconspicuous slippery and shifting stream rocks and making stream walking entertaining to say the least.

Netting was probably one of the most rewarding aspects of this job, especially netting multiple steelhead at once and getting to shout “double rainbow,” or even better “triple rainbow” (an Eagle Creek crew thing). Also, netting a really large cutthroat, steelhead, or especially an adult Chinook (which only half-way fits in the net), was pretty exciting. Rocking the shocker and handling fish were also much fun and very enjoyable.

In the field I observed not only the creek, but Eagle Creek as an ecosystem: deer, kingfishers, adult Chinook salmon, juvenile steelhead and coho salmon, Pacific Giant salamanders, garter snakes, and lots of sculpin – even a sculpin consuming a fellow sculpin!



As summer comes to a rapid and unfortunate close and books, lecture halls, and exams dominate the next nine months of mine, the experiences and memories of working in the astounding and beautiful Pacific Northwest with all the awesome and friendly people of CRFPO will stick with me forever. Working for USFWS was a great experience – thank you to all CRFPO’ers for an amazing summer adventure!

Submitted by Megan McKim.

Bio-sampling Salmon

Taking the eggs from a female salmon.
This is the time of year that we begin to spawn the Chinook salmon that are returning to our hatcheries. Hatchery staff do the actual spawning but people from our office are responsible for biosampling the fish. After the fish are spawned and sampled by the fish health people to test for disease, the fish are handed over to us.


The tag detector separates tagged fish from untagged fish.

Bio-sampling consists of recording the sex and fork length of the salmon. A couple of scales from each side of the fish are removed and placed on scale cards so we can determine the age of the fish later. We also collect the snouts of any fish with coded wire tags. How do we know if a fish has a coded wire tag? In years past, a fish with no adipose fin was tagged. Not so anymore. Most or all fish from hatcheries are now marked with an adipose clip regardless of whether it is tagged. So before heading to our table they all pass through a tag detector which separates the tagged fish from untagged fish.


Chopping off a snout with a tag.

What is this information used for? Aged scale data, coded wire tag recoveries, and other data collected during sampling is used to evaluate annual hatchery returns and compile annual run age compositions. Data is also used to help predict preseason run size for the upcoming year.

Visitors are welcome to view the spawning operation at our national fish hatcheries. Visit the Gorge hatcheries website for schedules and contact information or our salmon webcam to see the salmon returning to Little White Salmon NFH.

Submitted by Pat Kemper, Steve Lazzini, and Donna Allard

The Walla Walla River basin...it's not just for bull trout...

All of the previous pictures were provided by the Water Management Team of the Columbia River Fisheries Program Office.


This photo courtesy of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife captured by a trail camera in Wallowa County, Oregon.

This blog submitted by Courtney Newlon.

A teachable moment...

This summer I helped out with a summer school field trip to Steigerwald National Wildlife Refuge. Twenty-two students in high school were enrolled in the program. Some needed the credit, some wanted something to do, and some just wanted to hang out with their friends.

We had three activities lined out for them: birding, plant id, and aquatic insect id and water testing. The morning was spent birding and looking at plants. Both sessions were sucessful with many species of both birds and plants identified. After lunch, we got into the water in search of aquatic insects. A couple of students remained dry and instead opted for testing the water. Aside from the expected catch of stoneflies and mayflies, we stirred up a few lamprey ammocoetes which were burrowed in the shallows of the creek. I took this opportunity to teach the students about the life history of lamprey and why they are so important. The kids were pretty fascinated by the animals.


After releasing our catch of insects and lamprey, we headed to the buses, some wetter than others. We didn't care though because this day was one of the first days of warm sunny weather.

Submitted by Donna Allard

Last Day of the Season...for Mussels

Today was probably my last field day this year for sampling Western Pearlshell mussels (WPM) for signs of gravidity. Sad! The flow is low and the mussels are burrowing deeper into the substrate, making it harder to find them. At this time of year, when you pull a WPM out of the substrate, they sometimes squirt you and sometimes make noises. Maybe a bit more stressful with less flow and warmer temperatures? Or just a habit of theirs. I guess I wouldn't be quiet if I was pulled out of my habitat either .

Two new people in our office came out to help me. Rachel and Doug. They will mostly be working with the lamprey crew, formally known as the non-salmonid team, for the rest of the summer. Anyway, neither one of them had done any mussel work so they were excited and ready to go. Freshwater mussels already fascinate me so their enthusiasm made it even more fun.

There are few people who come out with me who actually will sample the mussels. You see, in order to check for gravidity we must open the mussel up about a centimeter to inspect their gills. That's where the mussel broods its eggs. So when I asked them if they wanted to sample they delightedly said Yes. I sampled the first couple of transects and showed them what to do and they pretty much took over after that.

The weather could not have been better and the company was excellent. What a great day. Thanks Rachel and Doug. I hope you enjoy your time at the CRFPO.



For more mussel blogs check out mussel mania I posted Feb 2010 and mussel mania II posted in May 2010.

Submitted by Donna Allard

Another Potential Threat to Native Species?

Recently, I was reading an aquatic nuisance species newsletter. In it, there was a little snippet about a creature called a ‘tadpole shrimp’, Triops longicaudatus. This animal is apparently sold as a novelty pet, sort of like sea monkeys. They are crustaceans with 3 little eyes and can grow to 2 ½ inches in length. They are sometimes called the dinosaur shrimp, having changed little in the last 200 million years.


Triops are interesting creatures, indeed, and is a very successful animal. They have become adapted to living in vernal pools or temporary ponds. In the winter and spring, as these ponds fill with water, the Triops eggs hatch. Within a few weeks, they can reach 2 inches in length. Being omnivores, they eat almost anything from algae to shrimp and insects, sometimes even their own siblings. After maturing they lay eggs. Triops can live up to 90 days, but die once the water dries up in the pool. The eggs remain in the dirt of the dried up pond, until the next rain.

Triops eggs are extremely hardy. The eggs can withstand freezing temperatures as well as hot temperatures over 200 degrees F for over half a day. They can also remain in a dormant stage for up to 20 years. Because they are adapted to living in temporary pools, the eggs must completely dry out before they can hatch, therefore these animals cannot live in permanent water bodies.

Tadpole shrimp are gaining enormous popularity as pets with many websites dedicated solely to the care and raising of these animals. They are cute and novel but we all know what sometimes happens when people get tired of or outgrow their aquarium inhabitants. Do you remember all those rusty crayfish which were used for educational instruction? Once the studies were over, the instructors or students would release them into the nearest water body, not realizing the impact the non-native crayfish might have on the ecosystem. The result: the rusty crayfish not only displaces our one species of native crayfish but also dines on fish eggs. Will Triops become such a threat to animals native to our vernal pools?

What do you think of shipping these animals all over the world? What might their potential impact be on native species if they are released?

FWS 101 – Fish Identification

The Columbia River Fisheries Program Office (CRFPO) recently held an open house, during which, a number of local high school students visited the office. Part of the open house featured a Fish Identification session. This was an opportunity for the students to learn about, see and experience some of what the biologists at CRFPO do every day in streams of the Pacific Northwest … identify what it is they are working with!

There are many types of fish in the world that have different appearances, different behaviors, and live in different habitats. So the initial discussion focused around what makes a fish a fish. While many people seem to think they know exactly what you are talking about when you say the word fish, sometimes it can be pretty challenging for them to give a simple definition of what a fish is. The students brainstormed a bit and came up with many of the important characteristics. In general, fishes have three important traits in common: 1) they live in water, 2) they have fins and 3) they use gills to get their oxygen from the water.

When it comes to identifying fish, it is also important to know that life is full of changes. Most fish go through a cycle where they start as an embryo (or fertilized egg), hatch into a larval form, develop into a juvenile form and finally mature into an adult form. Fish from the same species can look very different from each other depending on which of the forms you are trying to identify. For example, the picture below shows a larval (left) and adult (right) fish from the same species.


(not to exact scale, relative scale only)

One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish (Dr. Suess).
The students then worked through the classification system that most biologists and scientists use, and that many of them had already learned in school! This system is a method by which biologists group and categorize organisms by biological type, arranging organisms into a hierarchical series of nested groups. The scientific approach is to take all things and group them (from largest group to smallest group) by: Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species (which usually has a related common name). The following questions helped CRFPO biologists and the students determine if what they were looking at could be a fish. To possibly be a fish, they needed to answer “Yes” to the following: 1) Does it have cells with a nucleus? (Domain = Eucaryota), 2) Is it a multicellular, heterotroph? (Kingdom = Animalia), 3) Does it have a hollow, dorsal nerve chord? (Phylum = Chordata). Within this Phylum there are three Classes of fish. Chrondrichthyes are the cartilaginous fish for which there are over 900 species. Agnatha are the jawless fish for which there are over 100 species. Osteichthyes are the bony fish for which there are over 30,000 species. The goal of FWS 101 was to focus on five particular species and be able to identify two jawless fish as well as three bony fish. The jawless fish were both from the Order Petromyzontiformes and Family Petromyzontidae and their common names were Pacific lamprey & western brook lamprey. The bony fish were all from the Order Salmoniformes and Family Salmonidae and their common names were Chinook salmon, coho salmon and cutthroat trout.


Its All In The Sequence?
CRFPO biologists then went through a series of questions to help determine which of these five species a student might be looking at.

Question 1) “Is it jawless or jawed”? The pictures below show a jawless fish (left) and jawed fish (right).



To be a lamprey a fish would have to be jawless. In addition, lamprey have gill slits, no paired fins and a notochord.

Question 2) Is it a Pacific lamprey or western brook lamprey?

If it was jawless, what does the caudal area look like? Two common species of lamprey in the Pacific Northwest are Pacific lamprey and western brook lamprey. The larval forms of these species can be difficult to identify (see the picture below). Larval Pacific lamprey (left) have a relatively light caudal ridge with a dark, uniformly pigmented caudal fin. Larval western brook lamprey (right) have a relatively dark caudal ridge with a clear, or speckled caudal fin.



Question 3) Is it a trout or a salmon?

Approximately 18 species of trout can be found world wide. Five of these species are found in the Pacific Northwest. Three of the species found in the Pacific Northwest are native (cutthroat trout, bull trout, rainbow trout) while two of the species have been introduced (brown trout and brook trout). Although trout and salmon can look somewhat similar, trout have less than 13 rays in their anal fin (while salmon have more than 12).

Question 4) Is it a cutthroat trout?

A trout is generally a cutthroat when it has red/pink marks (slashes) in the throat area, speckles on its body and dorsal fin, and teeth on its tongue.

Question 5) Is it a Chinook or a coho salmon?

Five species of salmon can generally be found in the Pacific Northwest (pink, chum, sockeye, Chinook and coho). In FWS 101, if the students identified a fish as a salmon, it could have been either a Chinook or coho salmon. Chinook salmon have parr marks that are wider than the spaces between them, an adipose fin with a clear center and no spots on dorsal fin. Coho salmon have parr marks that are oval and narrower than the spaces between them, anal and dorsal fins with leading edges that are white followed by black, an orange hue (mostly on adipose, anal and caudal fins) and no spots on the dorsal fin.

Every day, from here to there, funny things are everywhere (Dr. Suess).By the end of the day the students had done a tremendous job absorbing all of this information. They skillfully used the key below and had become experts identifying these five species of fish. And you never know when they might find one of these fish in their neighborhood stream!

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FWS 101 - Dichotomous Fish Key (Abbreviated to help tell the difference between five species … Pacific lamprey, western brook lamprey, Chinook salmon, coho salmon, cutthroat trout).

1a. Fish is jawless (Petromyzontidae – lamprey) .................... 2
1b. Fish is bony with jaws (Salmonidae – salmon and trout) .................... 3

2a. Caudal ridge is lighter relative to surrounding areas; caudal fin is more pigmented relative to other species of lamprey …… Pacific lamprey – Entosphenus tridentata
2b. Caudal ridge has consistent dark pigmentation; caudal fin has relatively no pigmentation (clear) with some spotting possibly present .................... Western brook lamprey – Lampetra richardsoni

3a. Anal fin with 9-12 fin rays, dorsal fin speckled (trout) .................... 4
3b. Anal fin with 13-19 fin rays, dorsal fin not speckled (salmon) .................... 5

4. Red or pink streak on underside of each mandible; presence of basibranchial teeth .................... Cutthroat trout – Oncorhynchus clarkii

5a. Parr marks are wider than interspaces; adipose fin has clear center; no spots on dorsal fin .................... Chinook salmon – Oncorhynchus tschawytscha
5b. Parr marks are oval and more narrow than interspaces; leading edges of anal and dorsal fins have white followed by black; orange hue in adipose, anal, and caudal fins; no spots on dorsal fin .................... Coho salmon – Oncorhynchus kisutch


Submitted by Tim Whitesel, Jeff Jolley, Mike Hudson, and Courtney Newlon