Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Salmon otolith

Coming up after the comercial break on Dirty Jobs, Mike will be collecting Salmon otolith's.
I'm not sure how much they will show, but I'm going to check it out.

His dirty job today was counting dead salmon on the feather river (what state?.
The second part of the job was collecting 25 fish for measuring and taking scale samples and grabbing the otolith.
I of course would have like better detail on the collection of the otolith and then a follow up back at the lab, but it was still neat seeing about where it was in the fish.
I wouldn't have even known what it was if it wasn't for Pond Boss.
Oh yeah Dirty Jobs is on Discovery channel, and this was a new episode so it should be on many more times.
Matt Wehland

One other thing that was mentioned was that in the lab they were going to check the otolith for minerals and vitamins to check the health of the fishery.
I guess the otolith has plenty of uses.
Matt Wehland

I read the other day about using otoliths from stripers to determine where they spend their first year of life. It was in Long Island Sound.
There are many estuaries that are "striper nurseries" and connect with the Sound. Due to mineral content or pollution there is a different chemical signature for the vaious estuaries. The fisheries scientist was taking otoliths from adult stripers and microscopically
removing all the outside rings down to the otolith ring laid down in the first year. This ring was then analyzed spectrographically for chemical composition. It turns out that 70% (or something like that) of all stripers raise in the same estuary. The control for the study were pen raised stripers from the vaious estuaries.
A nice piece of detective work if ever I saw one!

Matt, the Feather is one of the many awesome drainages off the west slope of the Sierra Nevada Mts. Its a couple hours north of me. They all drain into either the Sacramento or San Joaquin rivers and flow out to form the delta and then out to the SF Bay, and into the Pacific. Many are great salmon fisheries.

edited post:

here's a couple pics of a nice (~40 lb) King caught by my brother up on the Sacramento River a little north of where the Feather dumps into it.

brother on left (he let the skipper hold his fish )


scale relative to brother (he's ~ 6ft tall)