Sierra Mountain Times

Story and photos by Thomas Atkins

One of the hundreds of Kokanee salmon seen spawning along the Tuolumne River above Don Pedro Reservoir.

From September through November, multitudes of salmon within the Pacific Ocean begin an incredible journey that takes them hundreds and even thousands of miles up the rivers in which they were born. This process is know as a salmon run, and can be seen in almost all the rivers across the West Coast, including the Merced, Tuolumne and Stanislaus. Usually late November is the prime time to witness this phenomenal event, but due to various conditions and circumstances, the numbers of this year’s ‘run’ are extremely low.

“Unfortunately this year is a really bad year for salmon, pretty much up and down the West Coast,” said Jason Faridi, the senior park ranger/senior natural resource specialist down at Knights Ferry, a very popular view point for salmon spawning along the Stanislaus River. “This is a bad year, but if you came last year you’d see thousands of fish. It is pretty neat to watch, and people come out here every year about this time.”

Biologists are able to figure out the number of spawning through various ways and in previous years they would often be found counting the fish carcasses floating in the rivers after the spawning has taken place. Yet thanks to the installment of a special river device in 2002, this practice is no longer necessary along the Stanislaus. This device, called a weir, counts the number of fish that pass through the river, giving biologists a very accurate number of spawning salmon. So far it reveals that the numbers are consistently lower this year than during the past four years. Earlier this month only 235 salmon had passed through the weir, much less than the thousands of salmon witnessed in the previous years. Yet even the previous years have seen a steady decrease in salmon numbers.

Last year the Stanislaus had 1,374 salmon pass through the weir, while 2005 counted 1,904, 2004 counted 2,232 and 2003 counted 2,665. Even these numbers are still far from the Department of Fish and Game’s goal of 10,000 salmon spawning on the Stanislaus River.

“Typically, what we would see is about 1,600 to 2,000 fish and right now we have about 200 that have passed our weir,” said Faridi, in a mid-November conversation. “It’s not a great water year. The last survey I heard from Fish and Game was that they had only seen thirty salmon in the river between Knights Ferry and Goodwin Dam.”

Dozens of Kokanee salmon looking for gravel beds to lay their eggs on a remote section of the Tuolumne River.

Although there are many factors to this decline, experts speculate that poor ocean conditions are the primary cause. Faridi thinks that it may also have something to do with the weather.

“Everyone knows that it’s unseasonably warm, and that’s probably one of the factors that’s not letting the salmon come up,” he said. “They might be waiting to be triggered by cold weather before they spawn.”
These salmon, known as Chinook, or King Salmon, typically leave the ocean near San Francisco Bay around July and reach the Delta by August. By September they have started their migration up the Merced, Tuolumne and Stanislaus.

Faridi, who is going into his ninth year working at Knights Ferry, explains the process it takes to keep the fish moving up the river.

“In the last 15-20 years since the inception of New Melons Dam the salmon will typically hold in the San Joaquin River until the fall attraction flows,” he said. “Fall attraction flows are when they pulse the river flows up by releasing water from the dam. This will actually trigger the fish to make the full migration all the way up until they reach the Goodwin Dam area. So this pulse of water attracts them and then the flows have to come down because the shallower water works out better for their spawning and it gives them better oxygenation of the eggs once they’re laid. It’s kind of mimicking what nature would do.”

Yet although the dam is able to simulate nature in some ways, it also causes a lot of problems for the salmon. The gravel which migrates down from the Sierra’s, is now trapped behind the dam and no longer can reach the lower elevations of the river, leaving the salmon without gravel beds to lay their eggs. Because of this, augmentation of gravel has been done by federal agencies such as the Corp of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation as well as state agencies such as the DFG.

“What’s interesting is that wherever the gravel is put, that is where the salmon spawn,” said Faridi. “But their size also determines how far up the river they will go. You will find the bigger salmon above Knights Ferry because they have bigger obstacles to get past, such as whitewater rapids. Many of these are pool and drop rapids and to make it up the falls it takes a bigger, stronger fish. The ones that can’t make it will spawn below that stretch.”

Chinook salmon are usually between 15 and 20 pounds, but it’s not uncommon to see one between 35 and 40 pounds. However, a record salmon on the Stanislaus passed through in the 1930s weighing nearly 150 pounds! Yet whether they travel far up the river or not, their main goal is to find a place to lay their eggs, and a typical Chinook female salmon will lay between 5,000 and 10,000 eggs!

“They lay a large number of eggs, because most of them will die from predation in the river itself,” said Faridi. “Some non-native fish species and even some native fish have tendencies to thrive on the fry (the baby salmon). After the fry are born, they stay in the area for a while but by February they start migrating down the river to the ocean. During this journey they will hit big pools in the river, which are left behind from gravel operations that occurred in the early 1900s. These pools are susceptible for striper bass and small mouth and large mouth bass, which sit and wait for the unsuspecting salmon.”

Those that do make it to the ocean usually end up in a fisherman’s net and on someone table. And the theory is that out of the thousands of fish, the expectation is that only two of them will make it back to the river to spawn.
“This is what the salmon count on to propagate their species,” said Faridi. “At least two to make it back. And typically the cycle is between four and six years for them to go out to the ocean and then return. This cycle is another reason that we attribute to the low number of fish this year because four to six years ago we had low water so we had less fish at that time to spawn and less ability for them to spawn…so its kind of cyclical.”
However, the East Coast salmon don’t experience this problem, because they have adapted differently.
“The difference between the Atlantic salmon and the Pacific salmon is that Atlantic coast salmon actually run multiple production cycles,” explained Faridi. “They can go out to the ocean and come and spawn and go back out. They’ve learned to adapt in a different way than the Pacific salmon, which go through a transformation that allows them to live in the salt water, and that’s the reason they die…because they can’t transform back when they reach the rivers. There are many theories about why this is, but one of the theories on the West Coast salmon is that traditionally before people were here and before dams, the rivers would dry up and there would be nothing for them to live in on the West Coast rivers so they would have to go out to the ocean just to survive. And so they came back to the rivers as a part of their adaptation to spawn in an area that had less predation than the ocean does. So they developed a bit differently than the Atlantic salmon, because their rivers don’t dry up.”

There is also another type of salmon in this area that experience a much different life than the Chinook. These are called Kokanee salmon, which are the land-locked form of Sockeye salmon and are found within many of the reservoirs in this area. In fact, New Melons and Don Pedro are in the top ten lakes in California to fish for Kokanee. In the early 90s a healthy, self-reproducing population of Kokanee were discovered in the lake, which were the progeny of a plant by the DFG in 1981. Since 2002, the DFG has stocked approximately 10,000 Kokanee in the reservoir each year.

Because these fish never migrate out to the ocean to feed, Kokanee are often much smaller than Sockeye. For them, the reservoirs act as their ocean, and they spend most of their time in the lakes. However, they still go through the cycle like all the other salmon and head up the rivers and streams to find gravel to spawn. Because the Tuolumne and Stanislaus Rivers enter the reservoirs in remote areas, this event is usually hard to see.

I first witnessed the salmon run on a remote section of the Tuolumne River, miles and miles above Don Pedro Reservoir. It was a spectacular site. Although they are not nearly as big as the Chinook (the biggest get around four-pounds), they turn a beautiful red color, and I saw nearly a hundred of them shimmering in a shallow gravel pool. Like the Chinook, these fish lay their eggs (but average only 450), and both sexes die a few days to several weeks after the eggs are laid, continuing the cycle of life.

This cycle of life is an amazing process to observe and hopefully during this time next year conditions will improve and more salmon will run our way again.