Untangling Steelhead and Rainbow Trout Dynamics in Washington’s Hood Canal: Part 1
Science Friday: The shifting baseline of Olympic Peninsula steelhead
Much of the original evolutionary fabric of wild steelhead populations in the Pacific Northwest has been lost to history. But how much, exactly? A new report examining Olympic Peninsula steelhead sheds some light on that.
Wild Steelhead Harvest: Biological or Social Issue?
In the final installment of our five-part series on Oregon’s Rogue-South Coast Plan, we recap some of our previous concerns and make the case why we believe wild steelhead harvest on Oregon’s coast must end.
How the distribution of adults impacts density dependence and mortality in juveniles, and why it is important to escapement goals
Nick Chambers provides a more in depth discussion on the intricacies and quirks of density dependence, why adult spawning distribution is a key consideration, and how those attributes are important to evaluating density dependence and estimating escapement goals.
The Biology of Harvest
In the first of our five-part series, Nick Chambers discusses why density dependence is important to fishery management and how density dependence is used to understand production potential of habitat and to develop escapement goals.
An Attempt to Breed Better Biters Has an Unexpected Twist With Implications for Broodstock Collection
On Oregon’s Alsea River a broodstock program is raising fish using both angler-caught fish and those fish that swim into the hatchery trap. These data beg the question of whether offspring of angler-caught broodstock would be more likely to be caught by anglers than offspring of adults that voluntarily swam into a trap. We dig into a recent study examining this in this edition of Science Friday.
Science Friday: Oldie but a goodie on steelhead fry behavior in intermittent streams
This week we review a Master’s Thesis from John David Faudskar, conducted when Faudskar was at Oregon State University in 1980. This study examined how young steelhead behaved during their first summer of life in the Rogue River watershed in Oregon.
Science Friday: Update on the Hood Canal bridge and survival of steelhead smolts
This week’s Science Friday is an update on a topic we have covered before: the effect of the Hood Canal bridge on survival of steelhead smolts passing through Hood Canal.
Science Friday: Juvenile steelhead finding refuge in tributary mouths
Summer is over, but before we put it behind us, it’s worth considering that the summer of 2020 was likely one of the two hottest summers in the northern hemisphere since humans began measuring the temperature of air and water. Hot temperatures directly—and sometimes dramatically—affect steelhead and many other salmonid species. So our Science Friday review this week of a study of steelhead in California’s Eel River is timely.
Science Friday: Juvenile steelhead feast or famine depending on the number of spawning salmon
In this week’s Science Friday post, we discuss a new paper where we show how high numbers of salmon may be more important than we previously thought for steelhead.