Hatchery project intends to help Klamath Basin fish

A project aimed at benefiting fish central to the debate over water in the Klamath Basin has reached a milestone. Participants see the project as a way to boost populations of the endangered Lost River sucker and shortnose sucker.

A team of biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service field office in Klamath Falls, Ore., began releases of two-year-old propagated suckers into Upper Klamath Lake, to increase the species' chance of survival.

Starting in 2016, biologists raised upwards of 2,500 juvenile suckers in a hatchery. The fish will be released into the lake during the next few weeks.

"What we're trying to accomplish is supplement the population in Upper Klamath Lake, both Lost River sucker and shortnose sucker, because they've had trouble having juveniles recruit into adults," said Dan Blake, Fish and Wildlife Service deputy project leader. "We haven't seen any recruit for, pretty much, more than 20 years now."

A senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Alan Mikkelsen, came to the Klamath Basin for the release last week, and said the fish represented "the first cohort of what we expect to be many more releases in the coming years."

With juvenile fish not surviving beyond the first year of life in the wild, the captive sucker-rearing program was authorized in 2013 and received $300,000 in annual funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

The first larval suckers were collected and raised for 18 months at a privately owned aquaculture facility near Klamath Falls. The fish reached an average size of 8 inches. About 7,000 more larvae were collected and raised at the facility last year. That batch of raised fish will be released next spring.

Blake cited several reasons wild sucker fish have not been reaching maturity in Upper Klamath Lake, including changes in habitat, water quality, lake levels, non-native fish and predation by birds, plus there may be an increase in the number of diseases and parasites in the lake. He said the fish-propagation project will buy more time for researchers who are trying to find ways to address the various impacts.

Klamath Basin irrigator Tracey Liskey, who owns the property where the fish are being raised and helped his neighbor Ron Barnes with constructing the ponds, has been working with the agency on the project.

"We don't change the genetics any by hand-spawning. All we are doing is growing them for two years, trying to feed them in the ponds as naturally as possible, but also supplementing them so that they get bigger. We are giving them a chance," Liskey said.

"In my opinion, this is the first thing that's been done since 1988 that's actually done anything for the fish," he said. "The only thing they've ever done before is raise lake levels, which hasn't helped the fish. We just keep losing them."

The captive-raised suckers are implanted with a passive integrated transponder tag that tracks their movements and survival. In addition, radio transmitter devices have been implanted in about 10 percent of the fish, Blake said, which should help the team understand what happens to the fish and may provide insight into why they fare so poorly in the lake. Suckers typically reach maturity at five years for shortnose and eight years for Lost River suckers, and migrate upriver to spawn, he said.

Klamath Water Users Association Deputy Director Mark Johnson, a trained fishery biologist, said of the project, "If the fish are on the road to recovery, that will take the burden off the irrigators and all stakeholders involved."

"The irrigators really want to see these fish recover, and a lot of people really don't understand that," Johnson said. "These listed species affect everybody and irrigators—their job depends on it. They are environmentally conscious and want to see good things happen and species recover."

(Christine Souza is an assistant editor of Ag Alert. She may be contacted at csouza@cfbf.com.)