Mike Wilkinson, DEC biologist for Region 9 gave an excellent presentation regarding the results of the Lake Ontario Pen Rearing Study's to date, as well as lots of other great information.

He started of talking about steelhead.

In 2003, 10,000 Skamania Strain Steelhead were pen reared at the Little Salmon River.

A total of 65,720 of Lake Ontario's steelhead were pen reared at various sites along the lake.

At the Oswego River, a steelhead survival study was conducted between 1998 and 2000 using two 10,000 fish lots per year. 10,000 fish lots of both pen reared and direct stocked fish were implanted with coded wire tags in their snouts and marked with an adipose only fin clip (that is the small fleshy fin on the back behind the dorsal).

The results to date have been quite remarkable. 83 steelhead with the coded wire tags have been recovered and the returns have been overwhelmingly in favor of the pen reared fish. Of the 83 collected specimens, 61 have been pen fish and only 12 have been direct stocked.

One interesting thing to note that the breakdown of those fish by location is as follows:

This seems to indicate that with more of the pen reared fish being caught in the Salmon River rather than the Stocking Site, perhaps the pen rearing achieves better survival of the steelhead smolts more so than stronger imprinting of the fish to the stocking site.

Mike then moved on to the Chinook Salmon Pen Rearing Projects.

A total of 225,000 Kings were pen reared in 2003. The Sandy Creek and Lower Niagara River fish were not held in the pens this past spring because, due to the prolonged, cold spring and slow growth of the baby chinooks, the hatchery wasn't able to deliver them in time to not conflict with other needs/uses at the pen sites, so all of the fish were direct stocked at those two locations

Mike then went on to discuss the latest results of the study being conducted at the Lower Niagara River and Oak Orchard Creek Sites.

This was a 4 year stocking study that was designed to compare the relative survival and return rates of 3 lots of fish. 40,000 fish in each of the three lots were fin clipped for identification, One lot was direct stocked fish from the Caledonia Hatchery, the second lot was direct stocked fish from the Salmon River Hatchery and the third lot was pen reared fish from the Salmon River Hatchery. Each of the lots received a different fin clip to identify which group the fish belonged to. The three clips used were Right Pectoral; Left Ventricle and Right Ventricle.

The fin clipping part of the study was switched between the Oak Orchard Creek Site and the Lower Niagara River site, alternating years so that the fish's stocking site could be identified by age analysis. This happened between 1999 and 2002

The following is a summary of the results to date:

Conclusions So Far:

Oak Orchard Creek: Caledonia and Pen Reared Salmon River Fish show significantly better survival and return rates over Direct Stocked Salmon River Fish. Pen rearing results look to be promising in increasing returns at that site.

Lower Niagara: Tremendously higher returns of fin clipped fish in all categories, indicating that the fish in all categories stocked in the Niagara river have a much higher survival rate than fish stocked at Oak Orchard. There was no clear advantage to pen rearing Salmon River Fish at the Lower Niagara. Direct Stocked fish did as well or better then the pen fish, but the numbers are so close as to be statistically insignificant. Caledonia fish had somewhat lower return rated than either of the Salmon River Subsets. It was noted though that the bulk of the early arriving kings (September to early October) were Caledonia fish with Salmon River fish coming in several weeks later into October. It appears that this diverse stocking approach may increase the duration of the fall run.

A number of possibilities exist that may explain this. One possibility is that since these were the fish that had their right pectoral fin clipped, missing this fin may have increased the mortality of this stocked group of fish. Another possibility is that the water at Caledonia warms up pretty quickly and those fish reach the stocking point in their development approximately 3 weeks earlier than the Salmon River Fish. This is at a time when the Niagara River is still much colder, so those fish exhibit survival due to the drastic temp change. Mike mentioned that one possibility that was being considered was that since the pen rearing of SR fish doesn't appear to provide any advantage at the Niagara, that perhaps the Caledonia fish could benefit from being held in the pens here.

The dramatic larger are of survival at the Niagara River over Oak Orchard is likely due to a number of reasons, the biggest advantage being that the huge volume of water at the Niagara gives the fish a better chance to avoid predators. The Oak, like most of our western basin tributaries is a warm water stream and has large numbers of predators (bass, northern pike, walleye etc) present at the time the fish are released and the fish there probably suffer a much higher mortality due to becoming fish food.

This warm water condition, however, is a likely explanation why the Caledonia fish seem to produce better relative returns at the Oak than they do at the Niagara. The Caledonia Hatchery gets it's water from a tributary of the Genesee River, another western basin warm water tributary.

One interesting thing to note is that there have been almost NO fin clipped fish returning to the Salmon River. That kind of clouds our theory that after the Caledonia Hatchery was take out of production in the early 90's and all of our fish came from the Salmon River Hatchery, that our fish were all returning to the Salmon instead of the streams in which they were planted. Of course, that still doesn't explain why our fall fishing completely fell apart at that point, but it seems that massive straying to the SR wasn't the problem. I am guessing that this was just due to very poor survival of Salmon River Hatchery fish stocked in western basin streams.

Other news:

We are getting a 10% increase in Chinook Salmon stocking starting in 2004. This will be evenly distributed at all stocking sites, with each site getting 10% more fish. Caledonia is being brought up to more or less full capacity, from the current 120,000 to 420,000 fish. These fish will be largely planted in western basin streams, and 50% of each site's allotment will be Caledonia Fish, except the Niagara which will not get an increase in Caledonia fish over what it is currently getting. Hopefully that means we can expect decent fishing for kings of the Olcott Piers in a couple of years, which really hasn't happened since 1994 in my opinion. This would be especially true if those fish start returning in early September like they have been at the Niagara, and like the used to back when we had Caledonia Fish before.

The Lower Niagara has also received 4000 yearling Brown Trout and 38,600 fingerling Brown Trout in 2003 and the DEC is pushing to get an annual plant of 5000 Brown Trout stocked in the Lower Niagara.

One BIG new item is that the DEC has initiated a Steelhead stocking program at 18 Mile Creek starting in 2004. Believe it or not, 18 Mile has not been receiving plants of steelhead for years. They have been planting domestic strain Rainbows there, but not the Washington Strain Steelhead. These are fish that the DEC has been putting in Keg Creek down the road, despite there being no official public access on that creek. These fish have been planted elsewhere in the last couple of years due to extremely low water conditions at Keg. So the plan is to take the 10,000 steelhead that has been allotted for Keg and transfer 7,000 of them to 18 Mile, with the remaining 3,000 to go to Keg Creek. This should start to produce even better fall, winter and spring steelhead fishing on 18 Mile Creek in a couple of years.

The Lower Niagara is also going to be receiving an annual planting of 10,000 Walleye. This is by the State in addition to those the NRAA stocks.

One area of concern is that this past fall/winter of 2003 and into 2004, 24 dead lake sturgeon have washed up on the Niagara County Shore, with an additional 8 washing up on the Ontario Side. They are still conducting their testing but they suspect that this is due to the same botulism problem that plagued Lake Erie a couple of years ago.