Posted: May 20, 2018
Link to My Edmonds News Article
Edmonds-Woodway High School’s Students Saving Salmon Club were out in Shell Creek on Saturday releasing juvenile coho salmon in Yost Park, along Sprague Avenue, near Holy Rosary Church, and along Brookmere Drive.
The students netted about 1,000 small salmon from the pond at the Willow Creek Hatchery and moved them into their natural habitat in Shell Creek. Streamside residents and others joined the students in trying to spot the small salmon swimming free in the creek after release.
Students worked with Walter Thompson, Trout Unlimited’s volunteer hatchery manager, to help raise these coho salmon from eggs that were brought to the Willow Creek Hatchery in December 2017. Once the eggs hatched, the small salmon were placed in the hatchery pond in February, and students participated with other community volunteers in daily feedings of the 50,000 small salmon in the pond. After growing to about 2-3 inches long in the hatchery, the small coho salmon are released to streams where they will live until next spring when they begin migration to the ocean. Coho salmon will grow in the ocean for two years and return as adults to these streams to spawn.
EWHS Students Saving Salmon club has been working to restore salmon runs in Edmonds through water quality monitoring, stream surveys, habitat restoration, and bolstering declining salmon runs through release of juvenile salmon into Edmonds streams.
“Shell Creek does have good water quality and habitat for salmon, but adult coho salmon cannot reach the upper areas of Shell Creek to spawn due to obstacles in the creek such as a 5-foot man-made waterfall located near Glen Street and 7th Avenue,” said club advisor Joe Scordino, a retired fisheries biologist. “The juvenile coho salmon placed in Shell Creek will grow in the good habitat and return back to the creek as adults to spawn in the lower areas of the creek thus bolstering the population. “
Students hope to continue enhancing the wild salmon population with juvenile releases until such time that passage obstacles can be removed and the natural population increases, Scordino said.