by Nina Wood
to fertilize a bowl of kokanee eggs from the
harvested females. The spent fish are given to
those licensed fisherman who come to the site
and sign in. Eggs are fertilized within seconds,
or they die and turn white. The white ones are
removed so they don’t impact the viable eggs,
which are then placed in coolers for transport to
Good luck to the West the hatcheries.
The annual taking of kokanee salmon eggs from local lakes is winding down for this year. Like each year when the report is made by Jon Ewert, CPW aquatic biologist for this area, new and interesting facts emerge. For example, while Granby Reservoir was the first lake in the state to be stocked with kokanee in 1951, Blue Mesa in Gunnison County, was right behind. And Blue Mesa has exploded with more than a self-sustaining population.
In 2016, Blue Mesa provided 17 million eggs, the most ever produced by a lake in Colorado in the history of the program. This year it yielded 16.7 million. Ewert says that success takes the pressure off him in trying to scrounge every single egg he can from runs in Granby and the Williams Fork, which haven’t been completely successful. In fact, he opted out of using the Williams Fork this year for only the second time in the 11 years he’s been with the program here. But Ewert says, “Currently, Blue Mesa provides the kokanee stocked in many waters of the state, as well as providing eggs to New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming if they ask for them. As with any kokanee populations though, it tends to be cyclical, and there will be a time when we need to augment Blue Mesa with eggs from other sources such as Granby and Wolford. That’s one of the reasons it’s important that we have multiple egg sources around the state.”
Other than Blue Mesa, Wolford yielded 875,400 eggs from 1368 females taken on 5 separate occasions. The kokanee there continued to spawn but additional eggs were not needed. Ewert noted, “ it continues to be the most reliable kokanee lake in our area. It continually gives us a great return on our stocking “investment” because we stock 100,000 kokanee there every year, and it has consistently given us between 8 and 20 times that number in terms of eggs collected.”
In Granby this year’s run has been disappointing. Some fish ran in early October, instead of the usual mid-to-late November run which has been the latest in the state. The early date is the peak of Blue Mesa’s harvest, and the Granby eggs aren’t needed that early. Why the change? Ewert apologized for his lengthy explanation.
Here is what I currently believe has occurred at Granby: 2011 was the last year that Granby produced enough eggs to stock it with only Granby fish (we stock 1 million kokanee every year, therefore we need to harvest about 1.2 million eggs for it to sustain itself). From 2012 onward, we have used Blue Mesa fish to stock in Granby, to make up that 1 million. Blue Mesa is always an earlier-running spawn than Granby, and peaks in the first ten days of October. There has always been a “nature vs. nurture” question about the timing of these runs — whether they’re dictated by the environment of the individual lake, or by the genetic identity of the fish, or a combination of both. Given our observations from this year, it appears that by stocking Blue Mesa fish in Granby, we’ve bumped the run earlier in the calendar by a significant margin, which supports the argument that there’s a genetic predisposition in these fish to run at a certain time. My hunch is that if Granby recovers eventually to the point where we can go a period of time stocking only Granby fish, then conditions in the lake (cold, short growing season, less overall productivity, etc.) will start working on the fish to run a little later every year. We would prefer them to run in November as opposed to October, because it’s beneficial to have these runs all on different timing, which spreads the eggs out timing-wise in the hatchery system.”
The fertilized eggs are now in hatcheries where they will be raised to stockable size by next spring and summer and then released back into various lakes.
If you are more “into” the local pike than the salmon, as of now 64 pike have been taken from Green Mountain and turned in for the $20 bounty. Twenty-six were turned in from Wolford, a big jump that suggests some pike successfully spawned there in 2016. The bounty program continues.
