For decades, the Stillaguamish Tribe’s natural resources department has collected adult chinook salmon from the North Fork Stillaguamish River to spawn for a hatchery supplementation program. Because of the loss and degradation of salmon habitat, hatcheries are essential tools needed to preserve declining runs. This hatchery program also has provided a comprehensive and long-running coded-wire tag harvest rate indicator data set.
The Stillaguamish broodstocking effort requires the participation of the entire natural resources department, as well as volunteers.
This video shows the teamwork involved while broodstocking at a well-known site they fish every year, as well as a new site where the department innovated a way to get the fish up to a tanker truck on a bridge overhead.
What happens after the fish are taken back to the hatchery? Find out in this video from 2014:
