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STURGEON BAY, Wis. – A newly installed pipeline is helping chinook salmon beat near record low water levels in Lake Michigan and their home creek to spawn, ensuring that the state’s chinook salmon fishery continues.
The 14-inch pipeline is sending 500 gallons of water per minute to augment the natural flow of Strawberry Creek, allowing the fish to swim from Sturgeon Bay Ship Channel to the Department of Natural Resources weir, where state fisheries crews collect their eggs. The eggs are taken to DNR hatcheries to supply the stock for Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan chinook salmon program, critical because the fish do not successfully reproduce naturally in Wisconsin tributaries to Lake Michigan and Green Bay.
"If the pipeline and pump had not been set up, we would have repeated last year’s bust, when low water levels in the creek and Lake Michigan made it almost impossible for chinook salmon to reach the weir," says Paul Peeters, DNR fisheries biologist stationed at Sturgeon Bay. "Last year, less than 1,000 of the 5,000 to 7,000 chinook we expected made it up Strawberry Creek over the entire spawning period, and we collected only one-fifth of the eggs we wanted. We didn’t want that to happen again."
Fisheries crew were able to collect the remaining 2.4 million of the 3 million chinook egg quota last year through backup facilities located on the Kewaunee River and on the Root River, but the low water problem at Strawberry Creek also hampered some ongoing salmon research.
To prevent a repeat, DNR fisheries and habitat operations crew members installed the pipeline to carry extra water the three-quarters of a mile from the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal to Strawberry Creek, above the chinook salmon collection facility. A diesel-powered pump supplies and delivers about 500 gallons of water per minute to augment the natural flow of Strawberry Creek. Revenues from sales of the Great Lakes Salmon and Trout Stamp paid for the project.
So far, the pipeline has worked well and the fish are arriving in greater numbers earlier in the run than usual, Peeters says.
Chinook salmon are not native to Wisconsin waters. DNR fisheries managers began stocking them in 1969 to control alewives, an exotic species whose populations were exploding because sea lampreys had killed off their main predators.
Chinook salmon have since become a popular sport fish, and DNR staff continue to stock them because they don’t successfully reproduce in Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan tributaries. Those waters lack the clear, cold, well-oxygenated streams that chinook, and their Pacific brethren, coho and steelhead, need for successful reproduction. As a result, the egg collection and stocking program is critical to keeping the salmon as a predator and sport fish. In addition to Strawberry Creek, which specializes in chinook, the C.D. Besadny Anadromous Fish Facility in Kewaunee and the Root River Steelhead Facility in Racine will be collecting coho and steelhead eggs this fall.
At the Strawberry Creek facility, the process begins when the chinook spawning run at Strawberry Creek begins in late September, triggered by the water flow levels and the temperature. The run typically peaks during October and ends by early November.
Mature chinook swim up the creek and jump a series of low barriers to the collection pond, where fisheries crew anesthetize them with carbon dioxide, weigh, measure and determine the sex of the fish. Fisheries crews then collect the eggs and milt, or sperm, from the fish, and mix them together with water to allow fertilization to occur.
The eggs are later transported to DNR hatcheries at Wild Rose and Westfield, where they hatch and grow into young fish. In April and May, 200,000 of the 2- to 3-inch chinook are brought back to the Strawberry Creek rearing pond to grow and imprint to the creek’s smell. Imprinting is the process by which salmon remember the smell of the stream in which they were hatched, and use that scent to return to the same stream to spawn when they mature. Chinook, like coho salmon, die after spawning once; steelhead may return several times to their tributary streams to spawn.
Peeters hopes the new pipeline will help assure a dependable source of water – and of eggs. Over the past 30 years, supplemental water would have helped the Strawberry Creek salmon harvest operations in one out of every three years, he says.
"In the future, no extra water will be required in some years, but when extra water is needed, we are now prepared to supply it," Peeters says. "As a result, operations at Strawberry Creek should be more dependable in the future, and that’s good news for sport anglers, and for helping keep the Lake Michigan fishery in balance."
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Paul Peeters (920) 746-2865
Uploaded: 10/16/2000
Uploaded: 10/16/2000