Great Numbers For Mokelumne River Chinook
Things are going well for steelhead and especially Chinook at the Mokelumne River Hatchery.
No fish story here: Our Mokelumne River Fish Hatchery in San Joaquin County is seeing historic returns of Chinook salmon and steelhead. Great partnership with @ebmud pic.twitter.com/xtcQzSQT6q
— California Department of Fish and Wildlife (@CaliforniaDFW) November 16, 2017
Partnership payoff: @ebmud & @CaliforniaDFW report record fall spawning returns of Chinook salmon, steelhead to Mokelumne River. Learn more: https://t.co/0NkKnoxiZM pic.twitter.com/sfzhm4YUNV
— EBMUD (@ebmud) November 16, 2017
Salmon population booms on state’s Mokelumne River as restoration efforts pay off https://t.co/6SnRAGOrAw via @sfchronicle
— Peter Fimrite (@pfimrite) November 17, 2017
Here’s more from Sfgate.com’s Peter Fimrite of the San Francisco Chronicle:
Salmon crowded in and around the Mokelumne River Fish Hatchery on Thursday, offering leaping and squiggling proof of what so far is a near-record return of the big pinkish delicacies after several years of low breeding numbers.
Schoolchildren watched as the fall-run chinook squirmed on conveyor belts into the “egg take” building, where, with help from about a dozen hatchery workers, they engaged in the decidedly unromantic process of spawning the next generation.
“It’s going to be one of the top three or four years that we’ve seen since 1940,” said Jose Setka, the manager of fisheries and wildlife for the East Bay Municipal Utility District, which supplies Mokelumne River water to 1.4 million East Bay customers. “We are getting more of our fish back where they belong.”
As of Thursday, 13,799 chinook, each weighing as much as 31 pounds, had fought their way from the ocean up the Mokelumne into the Clements facility, compared with 4,129 at this time last year. With about a month left in the season, the record of 18,000 salmon, set in 2011, is within reach.
Steelhead numbers are also way up for the second consecutive year, with more than 350 fish having returned to the hatchery — and it is still early season for the wild cousins of rainbow trout, which usually spawn through early March. Last year, a record 600 steelhead returned.
