Interior hatchery resurrected to incubate chinook fry caught at Big Bar Slide

"Adult chinook salmon are being caught at the Big Bar Slide area using a fish wheel and transported above the slide to French Bar Creek
where they undergo DNA sampling to try to pair them based on their natal stream of origin, he explained.

They are then being transported by truck to the Nechako White Sturgeon Conservation Centre in Vanderhoof where they will be held
until they are ripe and their eggs or sperm can be collected sometime between the middle of August to the first week of September, their natural spawning period.

From there, some of the eggs and sperm will be transported to the Quesnel River Research Centre (QRRC) near Likely
which was once a production hatchery for Fisheries and Oceans Canada and is presently part of the University of Northern B.C. (UNBC).

He said more recently Fisheries and Oceans Canada has used the hatchery to raise a small amount of fish for the salmonids in the classroom
program, but on a production scale it has not been used since around 2000."

https://www.bclocalnews.com/news/int...eid=a1e77eff14

Well, finally something positive. Not sure how a road trip from Big Bar to Hooterville and then to Likely can be survivable, but the proof will be in the pudding I guess. Good luck to them.

A small step in the right direction.

Those fish aren’t gonna hold in a hatchery setting to maturity for almost 2 months. Females will likely never ripen enough for eggs to be taken, yes hatcheries will be needed to rebound from the impacts of the slide but this early and far from the spawning grounds they would be better served to be sent on there natural way upstream of the slide to,do there thing

You know, as I said I had a discussion with a DFO Bio recently that works on the river.
I still cant believe that last season, they made such a big deal by not letting sportsfishers to keep chinook at first, when it ended
up being a great run, ONLY, to let these salmon go up the Fraser, AND NOT be able to get thru Big Bar slide anyways!!!
(the bio said only 500 or so made it past!!! his words, not mine)

So, remind me why they stopped folks from keeping salmon??
Oh ya, the whales don't know how to hunt seals, and we sure wouldn't want to remove any salmon from the FN hands, or should
I say limit their catches in the nets.

What I find surprising is, the DFO Bios sound like, in truth and the conversation I had, that they "do not support Hatcheries"
His words, "we try to close them down as soon as possible, and the reason why being that it reduces genetic diversity".

My god, here everyone is all worried about the lack of salmon, coho/ sockeye/ chinook (don't forget the soon to be extinct steels),
and they think hatcheries are a bad idea in the long run?????

Anyways, they should have been way better prepared with having swoosh cannons here in BC (cause it aint going to be the last
time we have a slide on the Fraser!!)

I suppose in 2 years time, there wont be ANY sportfishing for them anywhere near here in the LM or East side of the Island.
They need to hustle their asses and come up with a "real plan"...real quick!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bugle M In

You know, as I said I had a discussion with a DFO Bio recently that works on the river.
I still cant believe that last season, they made such a big deal by not letting sportsfishers to keep chinook at first, when it ended
up being a great run, ONLY, to let these salmon go up the Fraser, AND NOT be able to get thru Big Bar slide anyways!!!
(the bio said only 500 or so made it past!!! his words, not mine)

So, remind me why they stopped folks from keeping salmon??
Oh ya, the whales don't know how to hunt seals, and we sure wouldn't want to remove any salmon from the FN hands, or should
I say limit their catches in the nets.

What I find surprising is, the DFO Bios sound like, in truth and the conversation I had, that they "do not support Hatcheries"
His words, "we try to close them down as soon as possible, and the reason why being that it reduces genetic diversity".

My god, here everyone is all worried about the lack of salmon, coho/ sockeye/ chinook (don't forget the soon to be extinct steels),
and they think hatcheries are a bad idea in the long run?????

Anyways, they should have been way better prepared with having swoosh cannons here in BC (cause it aint going to be the last
time we have a slide on the Fraser!!)

I suppose in 2 years time, there wont be ANY sportfishing for them anywhere near here in the LM or East side of the Island.
They need to hustle their asses and come up with a "real plan"...real quick!

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You must have misheard or he was talking about a single system. There were a few thousand chinook that made it back to the quesnel system and I believe about 1100 that returned to the upper chilcotin spawning grounds alone. A fraction of the brood from 4/5 years ago but not 500 fish. There are many other systems north of the slide that were impacted but there were still several thousand chinook that made it past the slide.

This year the slide has barely had had an affect on the fishyet. They haven’t been able to pass hells gate until just a week ago. Sounds like They are just starting to arrive at the slide in recent days and natural passage is occurring. So bitch all you want but the work they did over the winter has been fairly successful and so far the slide has not been the choke point for the salmon.

And like my reply in that other thread. They do sipport hatcheries, just done the proper way on the right systems. How it has been done recently where they pump out an extra 10 million lower Fraser chinook fry that deplete the carrying capacity of the strait of Georgia before the endangered salmon even reach the ocean. These extra hatchery fish were not reccomended by the biologists, they were demanded by non DFO politicians to feed the orcas but long term may have a negative impact on the more endangered salmon stocks.

Nature is balanced naturally and human action that may seem to be for the positive can have unexpected consequences that are difficult to predict and understand.

And it it isn’t so much genetic diversity that is lost, hatcheries spawn quite often using genetic matrix’s, meaning the eggs of 3 or more females are taken and split into 3 batches. A different make is thennised to fertilize each batch from the females. What is impacted is the resilience of these fish long term as one of the most critical stages in a salmons life history is the juvenile stage when they rear in the hatchery, thus allowing weak juvenile survival genes to remain in the population. They are also coming back younger and smaller than wild fish.

I personally am a big supporter of hatcheries, but believe they should be producing fish at a rate recommended by biologists and move towards methods such as egg box planting to minimize some of the hatchery affects. Another major issue right not is habitat degradation and loss of spawning habitat and more should be done to restore the spawning grounds of the upper Fraser chinook.

Wing master,

Fish have been making it past Hells Gate for months now. FN started getting their first fish above Hells gate in mid to early April above Lytonn to bridge river area. They have been tagging springs and sockeye in that area since the beginning of June and even during the highest water this freshet they were still moving past Hells gate. There has been some delaying with the higher water this year but the main choke points are above Lillooet and the slide site. The work that they have done over the winter has been a very good START, but is nowhere near what is needed. Don’t know where you were getting your false information about fish not getting past Hells gate until this week:confused:

As for your comments in regards to the Chinook numbers to the Quesnel, upper Chilcotin and others...yes some made it back but very very few and nowhere near the brood requirements for these s systems. You have over 40 different Chinook stocks and systems above the slide alone. Even prior to the slide the numbers have been horrible....now with the slide it doesn’t look good.

As for your fry comment and carrying capacity of the SOG all of the Chinook stocks above the slide are stream type Chinook and spend very little of their life in the SOG and are offshore during the early part of their lifecycle until returning upon maturity. What stocks are concern are these SOG Hatchery fall white Chinook competing with? The abundant east coast Van island Chinook stocks? The plentiful Puget sound hatchery fish? The SOG has been seeing some of the best returns to th stocks within the straight.

You talk about carrying capacity? If you really want to name the problem these smolts encounter it is the seals and sea lions. If DFO wanted to actually HELP a cull needs to happen ASAP.

As for genetic diversity....lol..I am not even going to touch up on that one. I think I have covered enough of what you said already.

Oh and the mid fraser bands are now having openings on these endangered stocks...the lower Fraser bands have been having almost daily openings since April.

You wanna help these stocks keep working on the slide...but get rid of the nets and cull the seals. If fish can’t make it to the slide all the work in the world to the slide won’t mean shit!