This Saturday’s salmon survey looked a lot different than the last few as we saw nearly as many dead salmon as live. While plenty of salmon remain in the creek for viewing we saw a steep drop in live salmon and a large rise in number of carcasses.
Some trends of interest from the data Saturday (11/20/21) when compared to Tuesday (11/16/21):
- 88% more dead salmon. Parts of the creeks looked like graveyards.
- 36% less live salmon. While a substantial number remain in the creek they seem to be dropping fast.
While this steep drop in live fish will almost certainly flatten out, if it were to continue falling at this rate we would expect the last day of live salmon to be 11/27. In reality we’ll most likely see at least a few dozen stragglers in the first week of December.
There’s been a lot of questions from park visitors about chum spawning success and we’re happy to share that so far most chum are spawning successfully. Coho as usual have had a tough time. Note that 17.5% of Coho carcasses were marked as “Unknown” for spawning compared to only 3.1% of Chum. We typically see a higher amount of predation/scavenging damage to the Coho carcasses which may account for the higher percentage of Unknown.
Survey Totals
| Survey Date | Total Live Salmon | Live Chum | Dead Chum | Live Coho | Dead Coho | Live Cutthroat | Dead Cutthroat | Redds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-10-23 | 8 | 6 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021-10-26 | 33 | 27 | 0 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
| 2021-10-30 | 56 | 44 | 9 | 1 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021-11-02 | 95 | 91 | 12 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 14 |
| 2021-11-10 | 471 | 471 | 44 | 0 | 10 | 1 | 0 | 34 |
| 2021-11-13 | 497 | 496 | 43 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 11 |
| 2021-11-16 | 450 | 447 | 114 | 2 | 29 | 2 | 0 | 39 |
| 2021-11-20 | 287 | 285 | 263 | 2 | 6 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
Yearly Totals
| Salmon | Chum | Coho | Based on survey |
|---|---|---|---|
| 833 | 770 | 60 | 2021-11-20 |
A huge thank you to all salmon survey volunteers for gathering this data!