{"id":64490,"date":"2015-08-04T08:22:29","date_gmt":"2015-08-04T15:22:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev-clm-blog.pantheonsite.io\/?p=64490"},"modified":"2015-08-04T08:22:29","modified_gmt":"2015-08-04T15:22:29","slug":"saving-the-fish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/?p=64490","title":{"rendered":"Saving the fish"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past few weeks it has been unusually hot here in Klamath Falls. The worst being 102! So my fellow interns and I decided to spend July 4th<\/sup> on the coast. For a not well-planned trip it turned out amazingly.\u00a0 We lucked out and found a campsite not too far from the beach. And it was everything we had hoped for, the coast was cool, almost frigid and beautiful. \u00a0The small town we were near put on a great fireworks display on the beach.<\/p>\n

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Cape Blanco<\/p><\/div>\n

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Off the pacific coast scenic byway<\/p><\/div>\n

Back in Klamath falls, the area is still suffering from a 5 year drought. It was expected that water at the dams would be shut off at some point. Over the July fourth weekend the water was shut off at the Gerber dam. When the water is shut off fish get stranded at the base of the dam, especially larger fish, and if they are not removed will die. The Bureau of Reclamation took on the task of trying to salvage as many fish as possible. We got a chance to go out for a day and help them with their endeavor. They utilized trap nets in the large main pool below the dam and electrofished the smaller pools. Any fish caught were transported to above the dam where there would hopefully be enough water for the summer for them to survive.<\/p>\n

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Gerber Dam<\/p><\/div>\n

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Erica having fun saving some fish<\/p><\/div>\n

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Unfortunately this catfish didn’t make it<\/p><\/div>\n

We were especially interested in any sucker fish caught.\u00a0 All suckers were photographed, measured, weighed, tagged and DNA samples taken. They are tagged with what\u2019s called a pit tag, which is similar to what they use as microchips in dogs. \u00a0The tag is placed right in the underbelly, above the anal fins.\u00a0 A small piece of anal fin was clipped for DNA analysis.<\/p>\n

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Sucker fish<\/p><\/div>\n

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Pit tagging<\/p><\/div>\n

The next two weeks we spent trap netting in both Upper Klamath Lake and Tule Lake down in California. We are trying to catch suckers that had been released last year. The first week was disappointing. \u00a0We didn\u2019t catch any, but we did catch a variety of other species such as: blue chub, tui chub, fathead minnows, sculpins, perch, pumpkinseeds, black bullheads and rainbow trout. Attempts on Tule Lake were not very successful due to our motor not wanting to start when trying to head back to shore.\u00a0 We tried to paddle back to the boat launch, but the afternoon winds picked up, so we had to drift to the other edge of the lake and be rescued by our mentor. It was quite a long day.<\/p>\n

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Chub caught in one of our nets<\/p><\/div>\n

This last week on Upper Klamath we caught four suckers in a single day, which is a pretty good catch.\u00a0 This size of sucker is not seen very often and is similar in size to the fish we have in our net pens.<\/p>\n

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Sucker caught in our trap nets<\/p><\/div>\n

Over the weekend we finally made it to Crater Lake, which is practically in our backyard. You can hike about a mile down to the water to swim or jump off the cliffs. The water was a spectacular blue and of course freezing cold.<\/p>\n

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Crater Lake<\/p><\/div>\n

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Over the past few weeks it has been unusually hot here in Klamath Falls. The worst being 102! So my fellow interns and I decided to spend July 4th on the coast. For a not well-planned trip it turned out … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6987,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64490"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6987"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64490"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64871,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64490\/revisions\/64871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}