Rare Kokanee making a return to Lake Sammamish, one year at a time

Published 12:18 pm Thursday, April 21, 2011

Under threat of extinction, about 14,000 Kokanee salmon are now expected to find a home at Lake Sammamish.

It’s the second year the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery released the rare fish, but it’s the first time the hatchery successfully bred them.

“Historically the population was in the thousands, now we’re in the low hundreds,” said David St. John, chair of the Lake Sammamish Kokanee Work Group.

In a ceremonial event, a group of politicians and various representatives from federal to local levels, took turns releasing 75 fry into Jacobs Creek.

When King County Executive Dow Constantine held a fish in a Dixie cup for a cameraman, it jumped out into the grass. It took three men to carefully scoop it back up.

Instead of sending the fry out when they began eating, the hatchery kept them for another 26 days to ensure they’d be strong when released into the streams.

“They tripled in size,” St. John said. “Mortality has been really low throughout the project.”

The group was so careful with the eggs, it decided to send half to a hatchery in Quilcene in the event a catastrophe or power outage killed the eggs.

“We have so few fish, we don’t want to take risks,” he said.

The hatchery caught about 60 Lake Sammamish Kokanee in the fall, an improvement on last year’s zero count.

The group expects to see the progress of its labor in 2013, when the first fish return to spawn.

Unlike most salmon, these Kokanee never go out to sea.

Figuring how to breed the fish has been a learning process, because no one has done it before, St. John said.

In order to get the fish to identify the smell of the creek they came from, the hatchery took all its water supply from the various streams it planned to release them into.

Instead of cutting the andipose fin, as with Coho salmon, the hatchery changed water temperatures throughout their growth cycle to leave distinctive rings on their ear bones, he said.

At the ceremony Monday, there was praise give all around for the effort to not only restore the fish, but to restore the habitats where they lay their eggs.

“We’re working hard to protect our headwaters,” said Sammamish Mayor Don Gerend. “We got a couple projects on the fast-start list.”

St. John’s group identified 11 projects on Lake Sammamish that would help restore the salmon runs. Eight of those were in Issaquah and three were in Sammamish, including installing a culvert on Ebright Creek.

King County Executive Dow Constantine holds a Kokanee salmon in a paper cup for a camera shot. The fry, about the length of a toe, anxiously jumped from his cup April 18.

Kokanee Salmon are on the verge of extinction in Western Washington. These fry, which are about the length of a toe, are among 14,000 the Issaquah salmon hatchery plans to return to Lake Sammamish this year.

Don Gerend speaks at a celebration in the return of 14,000 Kokanee salmon fry to Lake Sammamish April 18.

Jessica Leguizamon, 10, from Bellevue puts a Kokanee salmon in the Jacobs Creek in Issaquah April 18. Representatives from federal, state, county and city agencies came together to celebrate the return of 14,000 of the rare fry to Lake Sammamish.