We have fish! We spent a week setting drift nets between 8 pm and 1 am (when the larval suckers are higher in the water column), off a bridge over a river where the adult fish are known to spawn. The first night we filled two coolers with tiny fish. We left them in the coolers over night, with a bubbler to keep the water oxygenated, and then transferred them to the pens the next morning. Each night we got fewer fish, but in a week we managed to collect enough to fill three of our five pens. The remaining two pens we filled with larval suckers brought up from a hatchery in California. The fish from the hatchery are Lost River suckers, the fish we caught are either Lost River or short nose suckers, they’re still too small to tell which. With any luck they’ll be short nose suckers, but either way, they’ll be valuable in testing and developing methods of rearing larval suckers.

Dock in progress at Tule Lake site.

Pens at Upper Klamath Late site.

Nets set at night to collect larvae.

Algae at one of the pens.

Since getting the larvae into the pens, we’ve been working on deploying Data Sondes to monitor water quality. We’re particularly interested in, among other things, dissolved oxygen because at some point in the season the algae is going to start blooming rapidly. Not too long after that, it will all die and the dissolved oxygen is going to plummet. At that point, we’ll be setting up an aeration system with a generator powering a bubbler that will aerate the pens 24/7 until conditions improve. So the focus over the next few weeks will be to get a good system down for reading and re-calibrating the Sondes and monitoring the fish and the water quality, and preparing for the crash.

A cooler full of larvae.

Up close and personal with a larva.

Larvae from the hatchery.

A lamprey that got caught in our net.