% CCR 31496:

The contract is being modified to include work and budget to genotype Snake River Fall Chinook samples.

Tissue samples were collected from Chinook salmon broodstock used at the Lyons Ferry Hatchery.  Samples were preserved in 100% ethanol solution and sent to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Molecular Genetics Laboratory in Olympia, WA for analysis.  

The three labs (WDFW, IDFG and CRITFC) will need to all submit their data into the same data base (e.g. CRITFC’s and IDFG database) and submit information annually (number of analyses, etc…) to the run reconstruction team associated with project 2012-013-00 who will be responsible for rolling this information up and reporting  it in their annual project reports.

1,216 samples will be analyzed.
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Genotyping of adult steelhead is funding by Douglas County PUD and is not part of this contract.  In addition, juvenile genotyping for the previous and current contract has been deferred until the 2014 - 2015 contract per agreements between WDFW and BPA. Hence, parental assignments can not be conducted until the next contract period (2014 -2015), at which time the appropriate WE will be added to the contract.

During the August-2013 to July 2014 contract cycle, we will trap, sample, and collect the necessary tissue samples from the 2014 brood of returning adult steelhead at the Twisp River weir, and will collect and sample juvenile progeny in the Twisp River.  All sampling data will be entered in local databases, and the genetic material collected will be transferred to the WDFW Molecular Genetics Lab in Olympia WA, for archiving.      

We propose to quantitatively evaluate the relative reproductive success of naturally spawning hatchery and natural origin steelhead in the Twisp River, a tributary to the Methow River in the upper Columbia River Basin.  Hatcheries are one of the main tools that have been used to mitigate for salmon losses caused by the construction and operation of the Columbia River hydropower system.  In addition to harvest augmentation, hatcheries have recently been used in attempts to protect stocks from extinction (e.g., captive breeding) and attempts to enhance natural production (supplementation).  Surprisingly, little is known about how much the investment in hatcheries benefits or harms natural production.  We propose to take advantage of recent technological advances in genetics to empirically monitor the reproductive success of hatchery and natural steelhead using a DNA-based pedigree approach.  For this contract period, we will continue to trap and collect DNA and biological data from all steelhead released upstream of the weir, conduct intensive spawning ground surveys and collect DNA samples from progeny (i.e., parr and smolts) of previous brood years.  Specifically, we will (1) directly measure the relative reproductive success of hatchery- and natural-origin steelhead  in a the natural environment, (2) determine the degree to which any differences in reproductive success between hatchery and natural steelhead can be explained by measurable biological characteristics such as run timing, morphology, or behavior, and (3) estimate the relative fitness of hatchery-lineage steelhead after they have experienced an entire generation in the natural environment.

In 2012, we released 102 wild adult steelhead and 125 hatchery adult steelhead upstream of the Twisp River weir.  Wild adult steelhead returning to the Twisp weir were generally larger, had a higher fat content, arrived at the Twisp weir earlier, and spawned earlier than hatchery steelhead.  However, hatchery females returning to the weir had greater fecundity than wild females.  Wild and hatchery steelhead were similar in terms of migration speed and spawning distribution in 2012.  Age-1 parr that were sampled in 2011 (i.e., offspring of the 2010 brood) were genotyped in 2012.  Preliminary genotyping results suggest that hatchery and wild mothers produced similar numbers of age-1 offspring; however, wild males appeared to produce more offspring than hatchery males.