the film forum library tutorial contact

Clearwater Region's Chinook Salmon Update by Staff Times-News, May 24, 2018

BOISE -- Despite continued high flows over Bonneville Dam, counts of Chinook salmon picked up over the last week -- many bound for Idaho.

The estimate of Chinook passing over Bonneville Dam as of Wednesday afternoon was 13,877 fish, based on monitoring of PIT-tags.

"We are fairly confident that enough will make it to Idaho to hold fisheries on all three of these runs," Joe Dupont, Idaho Fish and Game fisheries regional manager, said in a statement.

Two other happenings could change the harvest shares. One is how well the Chinook survive as they migrate from Bonneville Dam to Lower Granite Dam. Typically, with higher flows, survival goes down.

The other thing to be evaluated is how well the PIT-tagged fish portray the actual run-size. Typically, PIT-tag estimates represent about 70 percent of the actual run-size because PIT-tags do occasionally fall out of fish, and PIT-tagged fish can have a slightly higher mortality rate.

More than a thousand adult Chinook have passed over Lower Granite Dam in each of the past two days, so Fish and Game expects to see some harvest soon.

Related Pages:
Fisheries Managers Forecast 'Unprecedentedly Low' Summer Steelhead by George Plaven, East Oregonian, 5/22/17