Spawn Creek fencing and restoration project
Native Salmonid Restoration Using Streamside Incubators
Don Duff, Senior Aquatic Ecologist
Trout Unlimited National Partnership Liaison
U.S. Forest Service
125 S. State Street
Salt Lake City, UT 84138 U.S.A.
801-524-3945
email: dduff@fs.fed.us or
tudtrout@aol.com
Dr. Fred Eales
1250 Foothill Drive
Rock Springs, WY 82901 U.S.A.
307-382-4857
Joe McGurrin, Director of Resources
Trout Unlimited
1500 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 310
Arlington, VA 22209
703-284-9407
email: jmcgurrin@tu.org
Trout Unlimited (TU) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) are using "old refrigerators" and "ice-chest coolers" as streamside incubators to restore native salmonid populations. Beginning in 1998, “old friges”, have been used on the Goshute Indian Reservation, Utah, to achieve a 92% hatching success of Bonneville cutthroat trout (BCT) from green eggs to swim-up fry, and a 92% hatch of 5,000 eyed-eggs of triploid rainbow to develop a tribal recreational fisheries. In Central Utah, on Trout Creek, tributary to Strawberry Reservoir, the "old frige" had a 90% hatch success of 16,000+ green eggs of BCT. In Nevada, in the Lahontan Basin, within the Truckee River drainage, TU and the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe used two "old friges" to hatch 225,000 Lahontan cutthroat trout eyed-eggs in 1998. This was done in cooperation with U. S. Department of the Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and had a resulting 92% hatching success. Sec. Babbitt was in the western U.S. to endorse the use of the "old frige" for threatened and endangered salmonid species recovery in conjunction with stream habitat enhancement and land management plans implementation for native trout. The USFS & the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe, Idaho, are using the “frige" for salmon & steelhead in the Salmon River. This effort is used on the Salmon-Challis National Forest to recruit wild salmonids into the Salmon River, a tributary in the Columbia River Basin, and has a hatching success of 85% to 99% for both eyed and green eggs to swim-up fry. The use of the "old frige" and "coolers" represents another management "tool" that fisheries managers can use for replenishing salmonid populations for recreational fisheries as well as "jump starting" native trout in stream restoration programs.
This page last updated on 11/29/2007