Back from the brink of extinction

With the outgoing tide, thousands of juvenile summer chum left captivity Thursday, March 14, swam down Big Beef Creek and entered Hood Canal.

The fish, each weighing a mere two grams, had spent most of their short lives swimming together in a long, plastic tank. They ate small pellets and their environment of controlled well water allowed them to grow faster than their wild cousins.

But last week, it was time to leave the confines of the tank and rejoin the world. By the netful, the fingerlings were placed into five-gallon plastic buckets and carried to the creek.

Their chances of returning to spawn as full-grown adults are one in 1,000.

“Once they get out there, it’s a different world,” said Chris Waldbillig, a Tracyton resident who works as a scientific technician for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.

What made this experience unique is that Big Beef Creek summer chum have been extinct since 1984, after years of dwindling populations caused by overfishing, dredging, road construction and reduced water quality.

Summer chum on the creek were on the decline in the early ’70s, when the run often had fewer than 300 fish, said Steve Schroder, a state research scientist who did his University of Washington doctoral study at the university-operated aquatic and fishery sciences facility 30 years ago.

While the summer chum — which return to spawn in August and September — have been extinct for 18 years, Big Beef still supports a dwindling population of fall chum. A mere 600 fall chum spawn every year, down from historic runs of thousands of fish. Coho, steelhead and cutthroat trout also use the creek as a spawning ground.

The newly released summer chum are part of a five-year-old project by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the University of Washington Big Beef Creek Research Station and the Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group.

“We’re trying to make a self-sustaining run of summer chum that’s unique to Big Beef Creek once again instead of continually importing eggs,” Schroder said.

Using stock from the Quilcene National Fish Hatchery, 210,000 eggs were cultivated and released from 1997-2001 in an attempt to revive the extinct run.

In 1999 and 2000, only 20 or 30 summer chum made their way back to the creek. But 894 returned in 2001, one of the most prolific spawning seasons in the past 40 years.

“They were wiped out,” said Larry Telles, a fishery biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “To get any fish back is good — but to get almost 1,000 back is very good. Hopefully this will start a positive trend for this creek.”

Telles said a healthy chum run also is good for other salmonoids, such as chinook, which rely on the smaller fish as a food source.

Sixty-four of the fish that returned to Big Beef Creek in 2001 were culled from the run and artificially spawned to create the chum released last week. The remaining fish were allowed to continue up the Seabeck creek to spawn naturally, according to Waldbillig.

To distinguish the captive fry from the naturally spawning group, each egg underwent a painless thermal marking technique developed in part by Schroder.

The fish are marked according to the date of their release.

“We’ve hedged our bets of their survival by spreading their release dates,” Schroder said. “That way we’re finding out when the best time to release fish is.”

The first group was released March 5. The remaining batch is scheduled to be released in early April.

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