Planting Kings

Her penmate whacked her. Yeah, she's been sloshing around a bit, so we'll get our gear ready. Yep, we'll get our site set up. Um, we have a crew of 2 fisheries technicians that are collecting salmon for a salmon population enhancement project. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] They're collecting Chinook salmon on Moose Creek, and they have a permit to collect 20 pairs, so 20 females and 20 males.

Okay, shoot one. We collect the fish using dip nets. We store them in holding pens until the females are ripe. And when the females are ready, we take the eggs and fertilize them with milt and take them to our incubator and keep them for a couple of months in our moist air incubator.

So in October, after the eggs have been incubated for several months, we will plant them in the upper reaches of Moose Creek, and we'll plant nearly 100,000 eggs. It takes a couple of hours total. It's quite quick.

Portuguese. That's my bad. Anytime there's a variable, it's hard to remember.

You could see some foaming action just indicating it's actually being fertilized, which is a good sign. What's the sign? You see that, the bubbles? Okay. Um, wow, it's like a reaction.

Exactly.

Wow. And, uh, really, you know, probably a tenth of that milk would have been enough to fertilize all these eggs. Wow. But there's no reason not to, to make absolute sure if you can. And we give them about 2 minutes before we start rinsing them thoroughly with cold stream water, and we try to get them back to the office as soon as possible, whether that's an hour or two if we're taking eggs from a couple, 2 or 3 different females, then we really hustle to get back into the moisture incubator as soon as possible.

So naturally, fish dig a hole in the gravels, and the eggs and milt—. I got it. Okay. The eggs and milt are deposited at the exact same time into the water. Into that gravel hole, and, um, the, the water is flowing naturally, so they are fertilized and rinsed.

Oh, and washed. And they're super sensitive at this stage to any jarring, so we try to be as gentle as possible. And this road is awfully bumpy, so Kendra gets an enormous arm workout as we're bumping because she's holding the cooler for 10, 15 minutes with her shoulders and her biceps. And she doesn't even scream. She starts laughing when she's in a lot of pain.

She's the shocks. Exactly. Because, yeah, I should start calling her that. That's a good nickname. Human shocks.

This is the 5th year that we've done this. Yep. We started in 2007 and went 2007 through 2010. And 2013 is our 5th year. The way that we'll measure our success is by collecting the ear bones of returning adult salmon and to see if they are hatchery salmon from our moist start incubator or if they're wild-raised Moose Creek salmon.

The story is that one of the elders came to our environmental stewardship department and said, "Why isn't there any fish in Moose Creek? There used to be a lot of fish." And we started researching why. What had happened was as the creek went faster and faster and faster and straighter and straighter and straighter, it wore it down to a bedrock and then it started forming a cliff. And so it made this big waterfall. And although fish can jump really high, there wasn't enough room for them to get enough speed to jump up that high.

And so they were like, well, if we just put the channel back in, that'll get them around the big huge waterfall and open up the habitat. And fish usually come back to the habitat.

Yeah. Wow, I see them. Look at that. So it really is their eye that, uh, they have two, two eyes. Yeah, you can see both of them if you look close.

The eye develops first, the spine, and then the eye brain. Wow. Nervous system area. Okay. Is that the last one?

That's the last one you get to film.

That was completely wrong. Half choke, I'm sorry. Now it's on no choke. He's got it cooked.

Does he fly upward now? What's that? Does he fly upward? Fire on road!

Salmon alone are very inspirational beings, and hopefully they will grow up in Moose Creek and head out to the ocean in the next year. [FOREIGN].