Fisheries personnel from the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation were at the Plattsburgh marina today to begin the last year of an effort to restore Atlantic Salmon into Lake Champlain.
For five years the DEC has been stocking Lake Champlin with pen-reared Atlantic Salmon Two trucks carried 12 tanks with 26,000 pen-reared smolt, or juvenile, salmon to be transferred into net pens at the Plattsburgh Boat Basin.
Volunteers waited to form a bucket brigade to transfer the salmon. DEC Lake Champlain Fish Biologist Nicole Balk explained what would happen
“We’re moving fish from the trucks to the net pens. Walk out onto the docks to the pens. We’ll tell you which pen to go to until they’re all done," Balk instructs.
“We’ll line the buckets on the truck,” Balk advises.
A volunteer asks, “Are these buckets better for you here or behind you?”
“In front of me because I’m going to work that way,” Doug Peck replies.
“Yeah OK.”
Peck adds, “And then some can go over to the other side of the truck we need some.”
“OK, you got it,” the volunteer confirms.
Personnel transferred the 18-month-old smolt from the truck into buckets and throughout the afternoon volunteers carried the fish to the marina’s dock area where the sunken pens are located.
“Step up guys ‘cause the fish can’t be in there long," Peck urges.
Trout Unlimited member and past president Don Lee explained the fish is a native species that had been extirpated in the 1800’s.
“The advent of the industrial revolution and dams and stuff and the salmon couldn’t get upriver to their habitat. They’re kind of in trouble in the wild right now because overfishing and the fish farming is causing some problems," Lee said. "But today what we’re doing here is the Saranac River and Lake Champlain. And what we do with our net pens, we put them in and then 26,000 total are going to be in those pens for about three weeks. And then we’re going to release them and they’re going to go out into Lake Champlain and they’ll spend a year, maybe two years, in Lake Champlain. Then they’ll come back to this area, hopefully they’ll imprint on it and they’ll go up the Saranac River to spawn in the Saranac River.”
Volunteers dump the buckets of young salmon into the pens where the smolt will acclimate to the water.
Balk explained this is the fifth and final year of an experimental net pen project to reintroduce the species.
“We’ve been trying to restore Atlantic Salmon for at least 30 years now and so far it’s had limited success. But we keep trying and this experiment is an attempt to improve our stocking practices, try something new, see if we can create a fishery for people to go out and catch these fish," Balk explains. "Because they are a native species they’re one of the top predators, them and lake trout. So having them in there is pretty critical to maintaining the balance in the ecosystem.”
Balk says the program will continue collecting data for at least three years to determine if the salmon are adapting to the lake waters.
“These fish are all marked with a genetic clip. It’s not an actual physical clip you can see. So we ask anglers who catch salmon anywhere on the lake and the rivers to send us a sample. Take a little piece of their fin, put it in an envelope and then we send that to the lab. We look at that and say what percentage of them were from the pens? What percentage went right into the river? Were they from the Saranac, the Boquet, the Ausable, the Winooski? So we’ve got a lot of different things we’re working on studying about the fish movement and survival," Balk said. "So, again, we’ve got three more years of collecting fish and getting that data back even though we’re not putting fish in the pens anymore after this.”
Volunteers from Trout Unlimited will monitor and feed the salmon smolt daily until they are released into Lake Champlain.
The goal is natural reproduction of salmon in the lake and its tributaries.
