I've seen a fish with eggs and milt, I've seen countless fish with those little white dots on the eggs. But I've never run across this before ...

Any of you armchair (Smalma, you there ) bios have any insight on exactly what this is??

bob thats exactly what i have run into this year on grays harbors rivers.i have seen several like that,some even worse.one skein had exactly half with that on it.it appears to be dead eggs.i posted on another board about this and didn't come up with a reasonable answer.scott
http://www.scottguides.com

Looks like a clear case of "egg pocks" to me!

All kidding aside, I have also seen this several times on Cowlitz River caught fish (especially coho). I always thought that those white spots were "ruptured eggs". I don't know if you had noticed Bob, but on the ones that I have seen, those white spots are always on the outside of the eggs sacks and not found to be in the middle of the sack. It will be interesting to hear from one of our many bio members on what they think they are.

Cowlitzfisherman

Is the taste of the bait worth the sting of the hook????

those are albino fish

I believe that those are water eggs or some such thing.I watched them spawn the trout brood stock at the hatch and they had a a machine that would essentially candle the eggs and seperate the water eggs from the good.

I am just guessing now but that is what I saw at the hatch last year.I believe that the later season is giving you guys fish that are alot farther along in the reproductive cycle than we are used to seeing.

You let The Kid cure up your eggs again, huh?

Them there are Fraser Kings in the mix

Don't you guys know anything about eggs?

Those are the egg whites!

Those are net trauma fish, ones that have been chased around by an outboard and hearded into a net.

Parker,
Your killing me !!!!!!
Yeah Bob if you Fish with The kid cured eggs you will get skunked, Just ask Parker.
It will be interesting to see what the Bio says.
Also Parker, bring your own stash when you go on weds..........
Good luck
Peace Superfly

I'm a fish bio but not a fish phyisologist but I'll take a guess at it.

The small dots are probably parasite cysts. In time, they would probably hatch out into some species of fluke or worm. The parasite load on most salmondis is fairly high. This includes tape worms, nematodes, sea lice, etc. So finding parasites is normal.

The white eggs are infertile. Even if this fish lived long enough to spawn, the white eggs would not be viable. It's likely the high parasite load in the ovaries of this fish contributed to the high number of infertile eggs.

Since fish are cold blooded animals, these parasites are not usually capable of infecting humans. However, I make it a point to cook or smoke my fish before eating it. And I tend to avoid susi.

I have seen this condition in some coho, but not many. I've tried to cure eggs that were in this condition (even worse actually) but they didn't hold together. Hope this helps.

Looks to me like cut and dried case of yeast infection. Shoot a little Vagasil in to the vent before bleeding the fish.

It looks to me as if the smaller dots are underdeveloped eggs that never received any nourishment....and the white ones are not viable, just like the last post indicated.

Bob, do the small ones appear to be little runt eggs or are they foreign?

Just a side-note to the sushi eaters out there. To be eaten safely as sushi, salmon meat must be frozen(below 0 F)for at least 24 hours before thawing and consuming. In general, this rule applies to fish that spend any part of their lives in freshwater.

I too have seen this...... soemtimes the white is caused by the eggs getting fresh tap water on them, but in this case i think your fish needs a trip to the clinic and a dose of penicillin

I asked around, and my source at the NMFS gave me some good info.

From the photo it looks like there is a good deal of ovarian atresia (cell death). The small yellow oocytes are severely atretic eggs, where the atresia appears to have started a long time ago, while the larger white eggs are atretic eggs where the atresia started fairly recently. It is difficult
to discern the rest of the eggs from the photographs, but it looks like some are polarized, which can occur due to over ripening before ovulation.

The cause would appear to be relatively long term due to the apparent age of some of the atresia. Certainly some kind of stress, high temp, confinement, low oxygen, perhaps even inadequate energy reserves.

Bob, are you finding a lot of fish like this, and do you know if the river temperatures and oxygen levels are different this year than previous years?

You can see this sort of phenomena due to high water temperature.

Bob -
I'm with Parker's source on this. Often see eggs that look somewhat like those in the pictures in summer steelhead this time of the year. Basically over the course of the summer/fall the fish has exhausted all its fat reserves and begins to re-absorb their eggs in a last ditch effort to stay alive. Those eggs look to be in the early stages of this process.

In hatchery summer brood stocks typically as much as 5% of the females will do this. On years with low flows/high water temperatures this per centage increases. What is interesting is that as the fish re-absorbs its eggs its maturation stops and the fish takes on chrome bright coloration. It looks like a new fish (though thin) that is immature. In advance stage of re-absorbtion all the eggs will turn whitish/yellowish with the eggs collapsing or shrinking.

The small white dots that one typically sees in a healthy skein of steelhead eggs are actually next year's eggs. Almost immediately after spawning the females ovaries shrink down to thumb size filled with pin-head to match-head size eggs. Another interesting fact is that the fish generally has more eggs the second time it spawns than the first time.

Once again the female will brighten quickly and sometimes folks confuse a spawned out fish with a new summer fish (lack of fat in the body cavity and pale flesh is a give away that it is a spawned out).

It is possible that coho might go through a similar process on years like this year where they may be forced to delay spawning for weeks. Not certain about that as I have little experience with looking at wild coho eggs near spawning - those coho that I have cleaned over the years have been limited to bright fish from marine or tide waters.

Tight lines
Smalma

That's for the input ... I've never quite seen a batch like this before. Actually these came from a brat I caught on Monday (Thans Chef Pete for letting me have a turn!) ...

It looked like any new winter brat should ...



I was really curious if it was somehow related to the virus that had plauged many of the hatchery fish in this area years ago ... but it appears not so

Bob-
That fish looks more like a chromer summer-run then a brat...notice the extended caudal peduncle (sp?).

I always relay on the peduncle as a give away as to whether a fish is a summer-run or winter-run...so it does sound like Smalma is right (again).

Looks like a winter run hen to me....
Keith