Wildlife Update - 11/3/08

Squid Fishing. Squid fishing is a nightly event at the Illahee Community Dock. We are attaching some photos of squid taken this weekend.

Juvenile Salmon Jumping. Along the near shore areas juvenile salmon approximately 12 - 15 inches in length were seen in schools with some of them jumping completely out of the water. They were assumed to be salmon rather than cutthroat because they were in schools and because of their silvery color.

Dog Fish, Sand Sharks, Spiny Dogfish Sharks. We watched a gill netter take small sharks from his net today. We attended a lecture recently by Vincent Gallucci of the UW fisheries department who sited some interesting statistics about the small sharks that are so abundant in our waters. They don't get very big with a maximum length of 54 inches, but they are long lived approximately 80 - 100 years with documented ages from 85-107 years. Local females don't reproduce until age 35 and have live litters of from 6-12 pups. Their gestation period is nearly 2 years, longer than elephants. They have essentially been fished out on the east coast and there is concern by some for their numbers on the west coast. They were originally caught for oil for lamps in the 1800's, and then for vitamin A in the 1940's, and now are caught for fish and chips in England with their bellies to Germany where they are pickled and sold in bars. This is from memory from the lecture so we're hoping someone will check this out on the Internet.

Gillnetter Success. We have long wondered how the gillnetters are doing when they set their nets in Illahee waters. We went out in a kayak today to watch the operation and have a few photos of the Sea Spirit out of Suquamish. The salmon were all chum with some dark and some still bright. They had a small pellet gun to try and discourage a seal from raiding their catch. They found the chum were running more on the Bainbridge Island side than towards Illahee. The one set we watched the total catch after about a half hour, was 7 chum salmon and one dogfish. They had done better earlier they said.

We have some other photos of the gillnetter boat taken from the shore and will semd them out when they come in.

Jim Aho