Egg take means more kings for Willow Creek

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has been stocking Willow Creek with chinook salmon since the early 1980s, effectively increasing the chances of catching a king for the hopeful anglers who swarm the creek each June.

Their source of eggs for the stocking program? Deception Creek kings.

Dana Sweet, assistant area management fisheries biologist for the Palmer ADF&G office's sport-fishing division, runs the egg take. Sweet's role in the project entails supervising the two-person field camp, organizing the egg takes, rounding up people to help with the collection and coordinating the project with the Fort Richardson Hatchery.

"By stocking the system, we are adding to the fishing success of the sport fisherman," Sweet said. "We release them in Deception Creek, so they go back there and don't affect the wild runs in Willow Creek. There are still wild spawning fish in Deception Creek, but the majority of them are hatchery fish."

In early July, just as the chinook salmon fishing season ends, work on the Deception Creek egg-take project begins. A small camp is set up and a fish weir is installed in the creek.

The lower weir allows the kings to enter but makes it difficult for them to go back downstream. The upper weir, a floating weir, keeps them from going any farther upstream, where they would naturally head to spawn. Instead, the kings are held in the creek between the two weirs, collecting in pools of deeper water while they continue to ripen.

After the weir goes in, it's a waiting game, with an employee manning the weir site at all times until it is determined that the fish are ready to spawn -- usually about three weeks. Then the collection process begins.

During the collection, a handful of Fish and Game employees from Palmer, Anchorage and Fort Richardson travel to the site. Armed with dipnets and holding pens, they collect the ripe salmon, harvesting the eggs from the females and the sperm -- called milt -- from the males. The ripe eggs, which spill freely into buckets from an incision made in the female, are then fertilized using the milt, which is easily expressed from the male. The spent carcasses of the harvested salmon are collected by local mushers and used to supplement their dog-feeding programs.

Anywhere from 500,000 to 800,000 eggs are collected each year from Deception Creek. With each female having an average of about 7,000 eggs, about 80 fish per season have been harvested in recent years over a several-day period.

Area management biologist Dave Rutz explained why the eggs are nurtured at the hatchery, rather than being left in their natural setting.

"When they spawn naturally, they dig holes in the substrate or gravel. The males aren't always there to fertilize the eggs, and all this mixing has to occur. Rainbow and Dolly Varden eat the eggs," Rutz said.

"A lot of the eggs get washed out," he said. "And when the baby salmon come out of the gravel, predators -- like rainbows, Dollys, and now, pike -- love to eat the baby salmon."

Rutz said fish raised in the hatchery have a very high survival rate compared to when they are left in a natural environment.

"They are raised at optimal temps and fed every day, so they grow faster," he said. "And when we release them, they are larger in size, so we see more one-year jacks and two-year fish than in a natural situation."

In a natural setting, the return is thought to be one pair of fish for each pair of spawners, the fish essentially replacing themselves. In comparison, about 80 percent of the eggs collected at Deception Creek will be successfully reared and released, with an estimated 2-percent return.a 2-percent return??

When the chinook salmon eggs leave Deception Creek, they are transported to the Fort Richardson fish hatchery, where hatchery staff unload the eggs, adjust the egg temperatures and disinfect the eggs before placing them in incubators.

After about 40 days, the eggs are shocked and then mechanically "picked" to discard the nonviable ones. The viable eggs are returned to the incubators to hatch, and when they have emerged and are ready to feed -- usually by late November -- they are "ponded" or placed in the raceways at the hatchery.

The smolt spend about 18 months in the raceways, being fed and monitored to ensure they reach a target size of about 12 grams before being released.

John Unterberg of the Fort Richardson Hatchery has been helping with the Deception Creek egg take for years, assisting in catching the adult kings and helping spawn them. When it comes time to release the fish, Unterberg serves as the stocking coordinator. He is responsible for setting up the schedules and releasing the fish.

Unterberg said eggs collected at Deception Creek are also used for lake-stocking programs in Fairbanks, Delta, Mat-Su and Anchorage. Besides Deception Creek, there are three other brood sources for egg collection, including Ship Creek, Crooked Creek in Kasilof and the Ninilchik River.

Once released back into Deception Creek, the fish will stay in the creek for about a month, depending on timing and temperatures.

"Then, they go down through Willow and down the Susitna into Cook Inlet," Rutz said. "We really don't know where they go, but we know some are harvested off Kodiak, and in Kachemak Bay. But generally, they return to Deception Creek."

Salmon have the ability to imprint odors associated with their natal stream and they use these retained odor memories to guide the migration back to their home streams. But these olfactory cues are not always exact. Rutz said they don't all come back to the same spot and they don't all come back at the same time.

"There is a little bit of straying. About 1 to 5 percent show up somewhere else," Rutz said. "And when they do return, some come back as one ocean fish, meaning they will spend one year in the ocean before returning, and some as two ocean fish and some as three and four ocean fish. And a very few will come back as five ocean fish.

"It's a survival factor. If we have a total problem one year, we still have fish coming back another year," he said.

To help track the Deception Creek fish, a tagging crew works at the hatchery for a few weeks each year, inserting tiny coded wire tags into the juvenile fish and clipping their adipose fins to indicate they have been tagged. This happens before the fish are released back into the creek.

Then, during the king-fishing season, Palmer ADF&G sport fish division employees conduct an annual catch-sampling program at Willow Creek, looking for the clipped fins and taking the heads of any hatchery-tagged fish they find. These heads are sent to a tag-recovery lab in Juneau, where the data on the tags are read and recorded.

"That's to find out the survival rate of the smolt," Sweet said, "so that we can anticipate what's going to be happening in the future and to tell if there are problems."

In 20 years of Deception Creek egg takes, a few improvements have been made.

"In the beginning, we put the weir in at the Deception Creek bridge, and we used a picket weir that would sometimes push over during high water from the debris levels, so we refined it to a floating-style weir," Sweet said. "And we moved the site off the road, partially due to people, but also because it moves the fish farther away from the wild fish spawning in Willow Creek."

Sweet also said that while they used to try to seine the fish using large nets, the dipnets they now use allow them to be more selective in the fish they catch.

Rutz said ADF&G plans to increase the number of stocked fish being added to the creek.

"We are putting about 200,000 smolt in Deception Creek now, and our goal is to add another 100,000 in the next few years," he said. "About 50 percent of the Willow Creek harvests are hatchery fish, and a lot more are caught but not kept."

"The most important thing we get out of the stocked fisheries, particularly Deception Creek, is that it diverts pressure from the wild king salmon stocks," Rutz said. "We'd rather see people catch a bunch of hatchery fish than the wild fish. People who fish the small systems, like Caswell, Montana and Birch Creek, this puts them on Willow Creek to catch the hatchery fish. It allows for a bigger segment of the wild population to spawn, and that's going to be real important in the future."