Some Tag Data from the T

[Tim P]

Hi Folks.

For those of you that are interested in this sort of thing, I caught two tagged adult steelhead on a recent trip - within minutes of each other - on the Trinity on 10/19, and I just received the "at liberty" data back from the DFG (TRP). Both had been tagged at Willow Creek.

Both fish were bucks about 22-23" - one wild, one hatchery. River miles traveled: 39 (by my estimate). Days at liberty: 24 (9/25-10/19) and 37 (9/12-10/19).

So, one fish traveled at about 1 mi/day, and the other 1.6 mi/day. The reach in question included the "falls" area (Cedar Flat to Hawkins Bar).

If you recall there was a decent rain around October 1st - a short, two-day pulse of higher water - but otherwise a stable flow regime during that period.

As luck would have it, one of my photos caught the tag # on the hatchery fish - otherwise I wouldn't have had the presence of mind to remember which one was which. (It is my impression that in any given year, the WC weir only samples about 10% of the run - so that makes back-to-back tagged fish catches something like a 100-to-1 proposition; my lucky day :D ).

At any rate, it turns out that the faster of the two fish was the hatchery fish. At first I thought that was counter-intuitive; OTOH, the hatchery fish is imprinted on smells at the top of the river; I suppose it is possible that the wild fish was nearer to it's natal stream & perhaps had begun loitering. Also the hatchery fish's tag was a reward tag - I get $10 for the faster fish.

Anyway, enough rambling. Here's a pic of the hatchery fish - really a handsome fish.

7880

cheers

[Jeff F]

Interesting.....

I landed a tagged fish on the T a couple years ago. Looked almost identical to the beauty you got. If I recall, mine was not clipped. Got that fish in the Hawkins Bar area too. Collected my $10 in Arcata, then DFW mailed me the info a couple weeks later. Very similar to your info....tagged at the WC weir.

The Trinity is the only river I've caught a tagged fish. Just curious.......Does DFW tag fish on other rivers??? Seems like a good way to collect data....

Anyway.....beautiful fish, Tim! Thanks for posting.

~J

[Langenbeck]

The picture is stunning. Well done.

[Tim P]

Does DFW tag fish on other rivers??? Seems like a good way to collect data....

Offhand I can't say for sure. Anyone?

My impression is that the DFW is beset by lawyers on all sides, and the bulk of "biological study" which is done by DFW these days is driven either by pending litigation, EIR mandates, or a prior lawsuit settlement agreement. That characterizes their field work as being reactive rather than proactive, so I wouldn't anticipate them showing up to do tagging studies on any given river/creek purely in the interest of science. Despite DFW having a fisheries management role in the TRRP (Trinity River Recovery Program), it wouldn't surprise me to find out that the funding is entirely federal (BuRec?)

But it is valuable information for both anglers and fishery management purposes. I remember being shocked by official estimates of "angler contact" with fish being a fairly high percentage of the total run. I don't remember the exact number, but it was an estimate that anglers throughout the season "make contact" with somewhere between 10% and 30% of the entire run of fish. (That would be easy to deduce if the tag return percentage was high, so long as there is no reason to believe that tagged fish behave differently from untagged fish. But that particular estimate may have also relied on harvest/release data from report cards.).

In any case, that's a compelling reason for anglers to handle the fish they release with care - our impact might be bigger than we think.

My interest in the speed the fish travel is ... well, I'll let you fill in the blanks. ;)


cheers

[donkeyhunter007]

That is interesting. I had always been told hatchery fish make a relatively fast run for the hatcheries, holding less along the way than wild fish.
I would love to see more data on this subject.

[k.hanley]

Say hey Tim,
Cool post. Beautiful fish for sure.

I'm thankful you participated in the Citizen Science opportunity that the tagging program offers. You did a good thing there bud.

You hitting any surf on the way back down to SoCal? Safe travels.
Cheers, Ken

[roywest]

Can someone point me to info on reporting tagged fish? I caught one in early October, too, but didn't know what to do but send it quickly on its way.

[Tim P]

Say hey Tim,
Cool post. Beautiful fish for sure.

I'm thankful you participated in the Citizen Science opportunity that the tagging program offers. You did a good thing there bud.

You hitting any surf on the way back down to SoCal? Safe travels.
Cheers, Ken

Hi Kenny. I kind of burned myself out - 20 days of camping and fishing (Trinity-Rogue-Trinity). I could have stayed longer but I was just done mentally. Haven't fished since - nearly 11 days of no fishing! :D

Novermber can be good on the coast here for perching; maybe some of that will be coming up.



Can someone point me to info on reporting tagged fish? I caught one in early October, too, but didn't know what to do but send it quickly on its way.

Nothing special really - the DFW tags all steelhead it captures in its fish weirs, both wild and hatchery fish.

When you catch one, you cut the tag*, remove it from the fish, and mail it to the DFW office (the address is on the tag) with a little bit of info.

Same procedure whether you keep a fish or C&R it; same procedure whether wild or hatchery. The fact that a fish is tagged doesn't change anything about the angling regulations or the angler's responsibilities - wild fish need to be released and you can either keep or release a hatchery fish after tag removal. Report cards filled out the same way as normal; the tagging has no effect on that, either.

At a minimum, the DFW wants you to report:
1) the date, time, and location of the capture (lat/lon is best, but you could use landmarks or road mile markers).
2) whether you kept or released the fish, and
3) some contact information for you (in case they have follow-up questions or you are due a reward payment.)

Since the tags have serial numbers*, they probably already have a record of details about the individual fish (wild/hatchery, length/girth at tagging, marks/injuries, etc).

*try to avoid cutting the tag loop right where the serial number is printed. Any other location is fine.


I think that folks encountering a tag for the first time might be reluctant to do anything other than release because they don't know what the system is and don't want to "screw things up". But tag removal followed by fish release is anticipated by the fisheries biologists - it doesn't screw up any numbers. Even though individual identities are lost, fish subsequently recovered at the hatchery can be inspected for removed-tag wounds and then marked with a secondary mark to avoid double-counting this occurrence; and for wild fish - well, I suppose there is no anticipation of a hatchery recovery for most of them, so anglers removing tags from wild fish and then releasing them should be the only information the tagging program receives from tagged wild fish.


Mark-recapture (with some fraction of the tags being reward tags) provides a whole slew of data to fisheries managers:

- run size estimation
- angler/fish contact rates
- C&R vs. harvest rates
- occurrence of wild fish recapture vs. river location.
- fish movement speeds
- fraction of tags never returned by anglers (compare non-reward to reward return rates).

I pulled up a TRP 2006-07 report, and it indicated that for that season the tag data had estimated that:

- 12.8% of the entire run had been C&R'ed by anglers
- 2.2% of the run had been harvested under sport angling licenses.

That's 15% hooked and landed; given that anglers don't land 100% of steelhead that are initially hooked (my percentage seems to be somewhere between 60-80%) that suggests that perhaps up to 30% of the entire run of fish are hooked at least once by an angler on the river. Yikes! handle with care!

[k.hanley]

Twenty days straight chasing steel. Out-friggin-standing Tim! With cold that creeps into your bones, the morning fog, frigid waters, ice on the banks, a silver flash, sounds like a slice of paradise to me bud. Always a special place for another steel treasure. Two thumbs up!

Cheers, Kenny

[ycflyfisher]

Tim,

If you want to examine larger sample sizes and get more composite movement rates for the entire population, you could look at the annual monitoring reports for any previous seasons. The reports always tell you @ what river mile the WCW and the JCW are located so calc'ing delta d is a simple matter of subtraction and is a definitive figure. If you take the Julian week of when the progression "peaks" @WCW vs when the "peak" arrives @ JCW you get an approximate delta t. Open up the CDEC Hoopa gage with a window that runs from say Sept 01 to Dec 15, and you'd probably be able to deduce when flow spikes add enough turbidity and what effect that has (in general terms).

I'm one of those anglers that typically attempts to overanalyze everything that could potentially lead to me catching more steelhead. Strangely enough, I've never really calc'd how fast a tagged fish I've ever caught was moving or a composite for the season. I've always worked from the peaks and the uncrowded water I typically like to fish where the fish are vunerable under the current flow. Naturally, now that your post has me thinking about it, I need to know........

[hwchubb]

I've caught quite a few tagged fish on the Trinity over the years, usually during September / October, but never anywhere else in CA. Never thought about it until now. Most had been through Willow Creek within a week of Labor Day, which should tell us something about early September...

I know John Hazel swears that the Deschutes hatchery fish travel upstream much faster than the wild fish - interesting to see you found similar results. Maybe there's something to it. Thanks for sharing.

[Tim P]

@ycff

The WC summaries seem pretty repeatable from year to year - the peak of the fall fish come through there in weeks 40-41 or thereabouts. But the JC weir is mostly there for salmon monitoring ... and gets pulled after week 39 or 40. So, the mean movement can't be inferred from the sampling at JC. (Pulses of fish arriving at the TRH between weeks 50 and week 6 seem multimodal... but I suppose that brackets the movement time for hatchery fish between 70 and 126 days from WC to Lewiston )

Somewhere there's 10+ years of data from returned tags, and I'd hazard a guess that someone has looked at migration speed ... but where?

https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/documents/contextdocs.aspx?cat=klamathtrinity

[ycflyfisher]

Tim,
I don’t know what I was thinking and you’re definitely correct that the JCW comes down before the peak of the run progression passes over it. You’re also definitely correct about the clockwork nature of the timing of the peak over the WCW as I’ve for decades set my entire fall fishing itinerary on that week 39-41 window. IMO there’s even more resolution in that timing when you take into account which day of the week Jan 1 falls on ( because it sets up that year’s Julian calendar) and where the WCW is located for a given year. Those fish are pretty clearly on a definitive schedule and they seem to follow it regardless of low water/high water conditions.

I certainly can’t prove it, but I’ve always thought the hatchery fish slow way down once they hit the upper river in the winter months because of higher densities of spawning salmon and the releases from Lewiston that provide the cold water refugia habitat in the summer and early fall become a thermal warming source that influences aquatic life in the winter.

I think you’re definitely correct that the DFW has the data to calc movement, but I can’t recall seeing that data published or an admin document that attempts to analyze said movement data.

There’s definitely movement data and analysis for FRCs on the Klamath/Trinity, but they’re on a different clock than the fall steelhead are.

I’ll do some checking to see if the TRMU has anything that may be helpful to know.