Kootenai Tribe hosting sturgeon release

BONNERS FERRY — The Kootenai Tribe of Idaho invites the public to assist its staff with releasing young sturgeon at the Search and Rescue county boat ramp on Friday, May 12.

The release will take place from 9 a.m.-noon at the public Search and Rescue boat ramp (located by the Boundary County Waterways Building) one mile west on Riverside Street. Since it is a public boat launch, those attending are asking to be sure to park only in the designated areas.

At the release event, hatchery staff will release a portion of the one-year old juvenile sturgeon scheduled for release to the river this spring and summer. The annual juvenile sturgeon release is a part of the Kootenai Tribe’s hatchery efforts to provide young sturgeon until natural reproduction is successfully restored to a level that can once again support the natural population.

Since the beginning of the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho’s Kootenai River white sturgeon aquaculture program in 1990, hatchery staff have released over 284,000 hatchery-reared juvenile sturgeon into the Kootenai River basin. This has resulted in an estimated 12,000-15,000 hatchery-reared juveniles from 22 age classes still surviving. By raising young sturgeon in the hatchery, the Kootenai Tribe’s program has been and continues to fill the population gaps left by the absence of natural reproduction.

Since the 1970s, very few young sturgeons have survived naturally in the river. All hatchery-reared Kootenai sturgeon have been, and continue to be, spawned using wild adults captured from the Kootenai River. Each year since 1990, some of the spawning adults that migrate upriver toward Bonners Ferry have been captured between March and June. In 2016, Kootenai Tribe staff captured 13 females and 34 males for the hatchery program. During this spring and summer of 2017, 7,000 offspring of those adults will be released across sites in Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia waters of the Kootenai River and Kootenay Lake. In past years, 2,000 to 40,000 juveniles from six months old to four years old were released. For most of those years and currently, the hatchery juveniles were a year old when released into the river and lake. For a few years, the age and number of sturgeon released was varied to support scientific research.