We’re coming to the end of the Summer of Mishaps here in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Our project was to raise larval sucker fish in floating cages with the hopes that the controlled predator-free, high oxygen environment would improve their survival compared to the rest of the lake. Anyone who has read my blog posts will remember that at first we couldn’t find any adults to get eggs from and had to resort to plan B, collecting larvae from the river during a week of late night fishing. We spent months constructing our cages, only to realize that we needed to rearrange them when we tried to attach our nets. We spent nearly every day checking the water quality in the cages and were prepared to give the cages oxygen via portable aerators but the oxygen would dip on weekends or days off. The hundreds of fish we saw swimming around in our cages turned out to be invasive fathead minnows. When we quickly pulled up one of our nets several weeks ago to check our fish, we saw an estimated ten suckers total and that was before we found that river otters had chewed a hole in every one of our nets and presumably had a fish banquet.

To sum it up, hopes were not high that we would find many suckers when we emptied our cages to tag and release them.

We were wrong.

We only had time to empty one of our nets out of three today because we had eighty-seven shortnose and Lost River suckers. Eighty-seven! Eighty-seven beautiful little fish that we spent all summer raising and nurturing and finally got to release into the wide world of Upper Klamath Lake. I feel so proud. We have four more cages to empty, two at Tule Lake and two at Upper Klamath and for the first time in months, I am optimistic.

Suckers recovering nicely from having identification tags inserted in their stomachs.

A sucker!

Be free!

Life is carrying on as usual at the Klamath Falls Fish and Wildlife offices. We are monitoring our propagation cages daily and trying to avoid total doom for the young suckers. This month has had a few complications. Upper Klamath Lake has been teasing us with blooms of the dominant algae, Aphanizomenon flos-aquae. This aquatic plant grows in such high densities every summer that the lake takes on a “pea-soup” green color. It also smells terrible. This part is not so bad if you are a fish, but in some cases all the algae will die off at the same time, causing the oxygen in the lake to plummet to near zero. Our main job is to check the amount of oxygen in our cages continuously so that if the bloom crashes, we can turn on our aeration system and keep the fish alive.

Lots and lots of Aphanizomenon flos-aquae

In other news, we have a lot of fish in our cages but most of them seem to not be suckers. Last week we decided to pull up one of the cages to see how many fish we had. The unfortunate answer is not very many. Our two Tule lake cages have roughly 100 juvenile suckers per cage which is fairly dismal considering we put about 7,000 larvae in at the beginning of summer. Upper Klamath Lake has even less. If we were trying to improve populations of fathead minnows we would be a success story. Somehow we have thousands of this invasive fish in our cages instead. Oh well, it is a pilot study. We’re only learning for next time.

Lots and lots of fathead minnows.

Time for something more optimistic. We took a break from shortnose and Lost River suckers this week and participated in a survey for Modoc suckers. Unlike the other species, Modoc suckers are doing really well. Past CLM interns surveyed their range in Northern California and Southern Oregon and found that the species is present in a larger area than was thought when they were originally listed as an endangered species. This work has allowed one of the scientists in our office to file for delisting. The report isn’t finished yet, but the Modoc sucker could potentially be the second fish to be delisted in the history of the Endangered Species Act. We contributed to the monitoring of this species by helping with an annual survey to determine their distribution through Thomas Creek in Lakeview, Oregon. It felt good to continue the work of previous interns and work with a fish species that is doing really well.

There are less than two months left and work to save the fish continues in Klamath Falls.

Until next post,
Alanna

As things move to coasting speed in the world of the suckers, I have gotten a chance to branch out and help with other projects around the office. Namely bull trout research. The last five years of CLM interns have spent several weeks every summer electrofishing and tagging bull trout as well as red bands and browns. Fellow intern, Casey, and I joined in the tradition and raided the office’s communal supplies of camping gear for a great week of trout work. Electrofishing is like high speed treasure hunting for science. You walk up a stream and turn on the circular cathode of the electroshocker in areas that look like good trout habitat to create a current strong enough to temporarily knock out the fish. Ideally these are deeper sections with slower moving water. It took me a while to realize this. At first one area that the team leaders would say looked good, would look identical to another that they would pass by. But then it gets exciting. The stream can be totally clear and you won’t see any fish until you turn on the electroshocker. Instantly there will be trout everywhere and you will need to move fast to catch them before they get away or wake up from the stun. It doesn’t matter how many fish you catch, every one elicits cheering with bonus points for more than one fish at a time or stylistic grabs. It may be my new favorite thing.

Casey and I also got the opportunity to learn to tag the bull trout. Sticking a sharp needle with a tag into the back of a small fish is very intimidating for someone who has never even really handled fish before, but I got the hang of it. It helped that the other guys we were with caught and killed an invasive brown trout for us to practice on. It felt a little like a cat bringing home a dead mouse for their helpless kittens to learn how to hunt, but I appreciated the help.

Only a few days after electroshocking, we were given another chance to get out of Klamath Falls, Oregon for a few days. To check on our sucker rearing pens in the middle of the lake, we need to be able to drive the office’s two boats. The Department of the Interior requires that you have passed a Motorboat Operator Certification Course to do this, so off to Orofino, Idaho we went to spend three days playing with fast boats on a reservoir… I mean “working with”…yeah. Now Casey and I are free to go out in the field and deal with our ornery boats all by ourselves. This is a freeing feeling but also a little scary since our mud boat spontaneously decides to stop behaving sometimes. I’m sure we can handle it though. And if not, that’s why we pack extra oars.

Never a dull moment with Fish and Wildlife!

Until next time,
Alanna

On the hunt for trout!

Casey sizing up a trout

I’m tagging fish! And rocking a great outfit.

A bucket of trout ready to be tagged.

A bull trout

We have fish! Wooohoo!! I have been at the Klamath Falls Fish and Wildlife office for almost three months working on propagating endangered shortnose suckers. It took two months before I even got a chance to see one. To recap, we originally intended to collect eggs from spawning adult fish. We planned to raise the larvae in dock-suspended cages with the hope that the improved water quality and protection from predators would provide our juvenile fish with a better chance at survival during this critical life stage. The twist was that a surprisingly low number of fish were seen spawning this year and those that were caught didn’t have eggs that we could use.

This brings us to this blog entry in which we begin Plan B: Late night fishing for hatched larvae. We spent several days doing double shifts, office employees by day and larval fishers by night. It was a tough week of hanging drift nets in the river between 8:00pm and 12:00am and then returning in the morning to put what we caught in our floating cages. But you know what? Success!!

Just look at how cute they are!

Suckers galore!

Suckers suckers suckers!

Here’s the glamour shot:

An adorable larval sucker

About that step of putting them in our cages…. In my last blog post I described how we were almost finished with setting up our docks. It turns out we were a little farther away than we thought. Long story short, the nets we ordered were longer than the docks we built. This meant that instead of using our finished individual docks, we needed rearrange them into two large docks and use the extra pieces to extend the legs. And we had to do it all while floating in the middle of the lake. And remember how our docks looked like this?

Before: Tule Lake individual dock

Here’s how they looked after only a week of being on the water:

After: Our fragrant, reassembled dock at Tule Lake

Oh boy! I won’t bore you with details but to sum it up, it was terrible.

The good news is that after a week of reassembly, the docks are now finished at both Upper Klamath Lake and Tule Lake. They both have baby fish in them and I can officially say that the hard part of this summer is over. From here on out, we are simply monitoring the cages to make sure that everything is running smoothly. Here’s hoping that everything does!

Finished dock at Upper Klamath Lake, complete with juvenile fish!

-Alanna

Problem solving continues at the Fish and Wildlife offices here in Klamath Falls, Oregon. After describing my work to a friend at home she summed it up perfectly by saying “Your job sounds so adventurous and MacGyver-like”. She was one-hundred percent right. As of yet, we still don’t have any shortnose suckers to put in our dock-suspended propagation cages. Nor do we have any propagation cages completely set up to put our fish in, but we sure have been working our hardest, adventuring, and MacGyvering our way to that end.

It may seem like we haven’t progressed very far since my last blog post detailing our lack of fish and complete cages, but this project requires a lot of groundwork to get moving and in the last three weeks, we have come a very long way. For example, we completely abandoned our original plan to collect eggs from adult suckers. The prime spawning window has come and gone with disappointing and worrisome results. Smaller numbers of spawning fish than previous years were caught migrating upriver, and the fish that were caught didn’t have good eggs. Several factors may have caused this year’s unusual spawning including lingering cold weather (something neither the fish nor I seem to be happy about) and a drought year resulting in lower than usual water levels. In any case, the hunt for adult fish has come to an end.

The new plan is to suspend drift nets in the river this coming week. The newly hatched sucker larvae swim up from the safety of the rocky bottom during the night and are swept downstream toward the marshland and lake where they will spend most of their lives. It is going to be a long week, involving several late nights and will yield a grab-bag of indistinguishable larvae species. However, a grab bag of fish is better than no fish at all! If all goes according to plan, we should have plenty of juvenile fish by the end of the week.

I should also mention that part of the hunt for adult suckers involved a day of snorkeling down the Williamson River to see if we could find any large groups of them spawning. And by snorkeling, I mean drifting face first down the snow-fed, shallow river in a waterproof, bulky suit while holding my hands in front of my face to stop it from colliding with rocks. All while trying to spot skittish fish in water I couldn’t see further than three feet in. Needless to say it wasn’t very useful and we didn’t find any shortnose suckers. But it was a heck of a lot of fun.

So, that was the adventure part, now for the MacGyver part.

The best news of the last three weeks is that we got all of our docks out on the water! We have yet to attach the cages but getting the five docks assembled, out of the yard, and anchored in the two lakes is a huge step. The Jetdocks come in three by four individual floating blocks. Each block weighs fourteen pounds so you can imagine how difficult it was to move them when they were all attached together. We spent the last several weeks reorganizing them into giant “U” shapes from which we plan to suspend our fish nets. The instructional video on YouTube shows a teenage boy and an older man easily attaching and rearranging these dock with no trouble at all. What a lie. In the final stages on the water, we needed the help of an intricate system of ratchet straps, liberal use of a mallet, and two burly men from the Bureau of Reclamation. It took a total of five people about an hour per dock, but they are done! The best part of this week has been waving goodbye to the docks as we drove the boat back to shore.

So where are we now? We may have no fish but we have a plan and have made all the arrangements to collect larvae this coming week. We may not have complete cages, but all of our supplies have come in and we are ready to attach the nets. Hopefully by the end of next week, and with minimal MacGyvering and maybe a little adventure, the groundwork will be completed and the project will be officially underway.

It is my first week at the US Fish and Wildlife offices in Klamath Falls, Oregon and I hit the ground running to catch up with the progress of Casey, the other intern who began two weeks before me. Our project for the next six months is to begin rebuilding shortnose sucker (Chasmistes brevirostris) populations, affectionately called “suckers”. Klamath Falls is an area with an impressive history of water management. Most of the land has been modified by levees and dams to create extensive farmland where there were once miles of lake. It’s a situation that has been great for people but bad for suckers, whose populations have declined to endangered levels as a result of limited access to spawning grounds, poor water quality, and entrapment in water control structures.

We will be attempting to rebuild the populations by growing juveniles in several nets on two lakes, and in man-made reservoirs on a wetland habitat. These semi-controlled environments will hopefully give the fish a higher chance of survival by providing protection from predators and aeration to improve water quality. Although other fish populations have been successfully raised in suspended cages or reservoirs, no one has yet applied these methods to suckers.

In my (short) experience with scientific research, I have found that on your first try nothing ever goes as planned. This first week has been no exception. For example, we currently have no fish. None at all. In the two weeks before I arrived, all attempts to catch spawning suckers had been unsuccessful, including suspending a 150ft seine net across the length of the river. On my first day, I was told that we may snorkel three miles of the 9°C river as a last attempt to find the suckers. As an avid SCUBA diver and lifelong swimmer, this didn’t sound too terrible although, it was certainly intimidating. Luckily (or not so luckily, depending on your perspective) my day was instead spent studying the shortnose sucker recovery plan, watching two hours of training videos, and attending my first office meeting before finally driving out to see the reservoirs where we will hopefully be rearing some of our fish.

The reservoir ready to be filled with water and suckers

I returned to work Tuesday with the overhanging possibility of a snorkeling adventure. Instead, Casey, Josh and I took the boat on its first post-winter test run. Upper Klamath Lake is gorgeous and I am so excited to spend the next six months working on it. The lake is sprawling and surrounded by snow capped mountains on most sides, including the steep volcano that hides Crater Lake in its peak. Our nets will be located on the fringe of the Upper Klamath National Wildlife Refuge, a large, protected wetland habitat made up of tall reeds and home to myriad bird species. When you research Klamath Falls, most of the websites that come up are related to its famous birding. I’m not much of a bird watcher but I may have to pick it up while living here.

Upper Klamath National Wildlife Refuge with Mount McLoughlin

The boat started perfectly from its winter hiatus without any major problems but after that, the difficulties began. We had brought with us one segment of our unassembled dock. We planned to suspend our fish pens from the dock and intended to moor them in place with three meter steel poles in about two meters of water. At first, the poles sunk satisfyingly into the muddy lake bottom, securing the dock in place and I was sure that the sunny, calm day was going to be problem-free. That is, until the poles continued to sink through the holes in the dock and straight into the miles-deep silt layer as if it were quicksand. We were able to retrieve them but it was clear that a new plan was in order.

Our retrieved dock and poles in the boat

The rest of this week has been spent reassessing our original mooring plan (to include mushroom anchors designed for muddy bottoms) and fine-tuning all other aspects of the dock setup. This has mostly involved a large amount of computer research and visits to all the hardware stores in town to create a comparative quote list for the materials we will need to connect anchors, nets, signs, lights, etc. to our docks. In addition to hardware store visits, we trucked the giant metal box that will contain our aerator and small generator to all the wielders in the area, in a weird sort of wielder show and tell. Apparently no one can give you a quote for the price of drilling a hole and attaching a weather resistant air vent to your giant steel box until they have seen your giant steel box.

As a break from all this research, as well as hours of additional paperwork and federal forms, we also took a short excursion to a common spawning location on Wednesday. Naturally, there weren’t any fish there either and the search continues.

Do you have any shortnose suckers?

I do not.

Go fish.

-Alanna