Northwest Fishing Reports

I was fishing down on the Snoqualmie where the raging river enters in Fall City and there was a row of about ten or twelve dead kings laying there. The weird thing was all of them had there heads cut cleanly open from their nose to the back or their head. They weren't hacked open they were cleanly sliced from nose to past the back of their heads. I thought it might be a government study or something but these fish weren't super old, I mean they weren't fresh, but they hadn't spawned out and number of them were full of eggs. So I don't know why the government would do that to a bunch of unspawned kings. Anybody ever seen anything like this before?

There is an i.d. tag in the head of some hatchery salmon. When fish checkers swipe a scanner over the fishes head, it beeps if the fish has a tag(tag has information like when, where,hatchery,and river). The cut you are describing sounds just like the cut fish checkers do to the fish people have that are tagged, then they send the head portion to a lab to retrieve the information on the tag. Sounds to me like that is what has been done to those fish, maybe found dead already, so removed the part they need and left the rest for mother nature.

hope you grabbed those eggs though :o)

uuummmm ....that would be possession of "parts there of" wouldnt it ???......DOG

code3daddy wrote:hope you grabbed those eggs though :o)

that would be harvesting and also pouching.....so yeah...have fun with that ticket.

I dont think its legal to take eggs from dead salmon. I did this once years ago on the Wenatchee thinking what a waste to just not let them out. I was warned then. Havent done it since.

Those fish were part of a spawning ground survey. They heads were cut for 1 of 2 reasons, either collecting Coded Wire Tags in the snout, or otolith recovery. From the sounds of it (the way the cuts were made) they were after the otoliths. If the fish were sampled they had died from natural causes, it is not uncommon to see fish with some eggs left in them even after they spawn, it is also not uncommon to have pre-spawn mortality in some fish that never make it to redd. As far as taking the eggs goes, I believe it would not be lawful to do so, but more importantly the fish were probably super ripe by that point and they eggs would likely be free of the skein making them useless as bait.

Yea, I saw how they did the surveys on an episode of The Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs. They slice the fish, if it's got a tag in it they take out the jaw it's for the science purpose of age health and whatnot. They mark the fish so that they know they've counted it. They did it with dead salmon in the rivers. I've seen the checkers floating down the green/duwamish rivers doing it.

some friends of mine work for WDFW doing spawner surveys . And kings in the Raging commonly die before spawning .I know they,ve been in the Snoqualmie area lately I,ll find out tommorow

cudaman wrote:some friends of mine work for WDFW doing spawner surveys . And kings in the Raging commonly die before spawning .I know they,ve been in the Snoqualmie area lately I,ll find out tommorow

Another important consideration to make is that salmon frequently retain up to 20% of their egg load after spawning, and therefore will continue spewing ripe eggs after they have died even though they have already distributed the majority of their eggs on the redd.