What determines if a fish will come back as a 2 Salt or a 3 Salt? I know the 3 Salts spend an extra year at sea but what causes them to do this?


What we need to do it determine how to breed some 7 Salts

Primarily the genetic disposition of the fish. Some anadramous populations show higher percentages of spending more time at sea:

Kenai kings are that way, one of the reasons they caome back so big.

OP steelhead have a tendancy to have a higher percentage of fish spending more time at sea vs. most Puget Sound streams, thus the fact that a great percentage of them are larger.

Not always sea time either, Skeena system steelhead usually spend another year in the rivers, allowing them to migrate out at a larger size and consequently they feed and grow faster in their sea time and come back larger even though at sea time is the same.

Genetics are important, and thus one of the reasons many of us are pro-release for wild steelhead ... their genetic diversity covers a broader spectrum than do salmon when it comes to life histories. Each one is important and if you only kill big fish, odds are they're gonna get smaller in succeeding generations ... studies on other fish species prove this!

Thanks Bob

OK that makes sense but take the Snohomish system for example. Don't all those fish have the same genetic disposition? I thought all of those hatchery brats were from the Skamania strain. If they are all from the same strain shouldn't they all come back at the same time. But as we know they don't all come back at the same time some come back after 2 years and some after 3, or at least that is what I have heard. If this is true it does not make sense.

Actually, I'm pretty sure all your winter fish are Chambers stock, the summer fish are probably Skamania strain ... Smalma or someone who fishes those rivers a lot could confirm / deny that.

I think I failed to make my point in the previous post. Every strain / population has a unique, but there is a rough set percentage of fish that come back after different times. There is a wide variance of these percentages from system to sytem in the wild fish ... but the uniformity of the hatchery fish in all rivers using these stocks show similar percentages of 2's and 3's across the board ... thus you see the same size fish as a whole in the Sky, the Green, or the Bogey. Rivers such as as the Cow and Quinault use different strains and thus you usually see some bigger fish ... some of the other coastal rivers receive USF&W Sevice plants of these Quinault fish, and thus the bigger "brats" we often see there

You'll see some variation due to outside factors (for example may of the expected twos on the Bogey this year got a bad batch of feed and went out undersized), so you'll likely see some consequences of that on their survival / return rate.

Hey Dave,

Don't forget us"4Salts"! Contrary to popular opinion we're part of the gene pool too! (And no, not the part that needs the chlorine!)

Thanks Bob

Can you tell the differance of the strains just by looking at them at a glance? I know I can't, I have a hard enough time with the Hen Vs. the Buck thing until I cut it open.

The strains of hatchery stocks, usually. They're typically different builds. Chambers Creek stock as we see them now, typically lack any semblance of shoulders as most wild fish have and some of the other hatchery strains.

In terms of two salt vs. three? Not really ... obviously, 99% of the really small ones will be twos, 99% of the big ones will be threes. The above average fish can often be smaller threes or larger two's.

You can tell by reading the annuli on the scales. That's why WDFW checkers will ask for scale samples from your fish.

You can get number of freshwater years and salt years and any spawning runs in the mix by reading them ... much like looking at the rings on a tree

Remember that there are other influences too, and we may actually be seeing some of it now. Some west coats streams that had a lot of warm water off the coast the last go round of El Nino saw diminished returns that year, and then higher returns of three the next year ... almost seemed like the fish wouldn't push through it and said the heck with it!

Mark

"And no, not the part that needs the chlorine"

LOL

I could not have said it better :p

"almost seemed like the fish wouldn't push through it and said the heck with it!"

Sometimes I wonder if they do catch a sort of attitude and just do there own thing.

Lead thrower -
Bob is correct! The standard Puget Sound hatchery steelhead are of 2 general stocks. The winters from a composite early stock called Chamber's Creek (a hatchery located in south Tacoma on a creek by that name) and the summers while now from the Reiter (South Fork Skykomish) were originally form the Columbia country - Skamania stock.

The physcial characteristics of fish are the results of selective pressure on the population for what works best for the fish. What genetic traits that allow for the best survival are passed on to the next generation at higher rates than those traits that are less advantageous.

That can mean that fish can be very different in different environments. Not all wild steelhead are large fish. For example nearly all of the native summer populations of Puget Sound are almost exclusively 1-salt fish (less than a 5# average)- the Deer Creek fish (North Fork Stillaguamish) are more than 95% 1-salts. While some of the winter populations from the same river systems are more than 50% 3-salts. The reason of ocurse is that 1-salt size fish are more successfully accessing and surviving in their headwater streams. The larger size associated with 3-salts works best in the large rivers with their larger substrates.

Bob mentioned the large kings found on the Kenai. Many have forgotten that similar sized kings were once found here right in Washington - examples include those found in the Skagit and Elwha. Those brutes of more than 80 pounds (in the case of Elwha some exceeded 100#) are older than the "normal" chinook perhaps as much as 8 years old. We lost those monster fish because being large long lived individuals was not longer a successful strategy. Those old fish were selected against by our fisheries (sport and troll) on their feeding grounds. The longer they remianed at sea the higher the probability that they would be caught - a fish returning after say 2 years of being fishing on have higher survival rates than those being fished for 4 or 5 years. If we wish to see those fish again that we to insure that being long lived is an advantage.

Tight lines
Smalma