I'm taking off in the morning for the Hoh, so this will be short, but
hit on the main points of last night's presentation in Port Angeles.
I'm including the things I remember from the talk, and I'm omitting
anything I'm not sure was straight from Sam or Steve. Come to think of
it, I'm omitting lots of things I don't remember off hand as well.

Sam Brenkman is the National Park biologist in charge of the bull trout
telemetry study. He and Steve Corbet gave a presentation to about 30
or 40 people last night at the visitor center in Port Angeles to
describe the intermediate results of his study. The study is
commissioned for 4 years, so he's just past half way through it.

For 2 and a half years he's been inserting coded radio tags in Hoh
river Bull Trout. 72 fish were captured in the Hoh, mostly by hook and
line, and 9 were captured in Kalalock Creek. They also acquired 107
frozen fish that were unintentionally netted by the local tribes at the
mouth of the Hoh. The frozen fish were disected and analyzed for
various genetic data, and stomach contents. Almost all the food they
could identify was surf smelt, the remaining 8% was sculpins. All
these fish were netted near the salt, so this reflects the food they
find in the estuary.

All the fish wandered out to the ocean, and most of them were later
found at the mouths of the rivers south of the Hoh, down to the
Quinalt. 25 fish went into the ocean after spawning and disapeared.
One of those came back last week after 15 or 16 months of absence.
They're hoping more of the 25 will return from their wandering. No
tagged fish have been detected north of the Hoh.

Sam said this was the first study to prove that Bull Trout can be
anadromous. There is lots of evidence for migration into and out of
reservoirs (I've forgotten the word like anadromous for this behaviour)
in inland areas, but this is the first study to find them in the ocean.

The west coast river fish are all bull trout, no dolly varden. There
are landlocked populations of dolly varden in the upper Queets, upper
Sol Duc, both populations are above structure that blocks upstream
migration. This was interesting because it's exactly backwards of the
expected distribution. Prior to this study, Bulls were considered an
interior fish, and Dollies were their anadromous cousin.

Despite the similar appearance of bulls and dollies, they are no more
similar than cutthroat and rainbow trout.

Bulls will cross breed with brook trout, but the offspring are sterile.
Sam didn't provide details about the results of bulls and dollies
cross breeding.

Chas
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