WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:03.300 --> 00:00:06.140 [water flowing in a stream] 00:00:06.140 --> 00:00:08.000 [Brannon Ketcham] The watersheds of coastal Marin County 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:12.060 have supported coho salmon and steelhead trout for thousands of years. 00:00:12.380 --> 00:00:15.320 In the last 50 years, throughout the California coast, 00:00:15.320 --> 00:00:18.540 we have witnessed a dramatic decline in fish populations. 00:00:18.920 --> 00:00:23.600 This decline coincides with impacts to the watersheds in which these fish survive 00:00:23.600 --> 00:00:34.540 [water flowing in a stream] 00:00:34.540 --> 00:00:40.040 In 1996, the National Marine Fisheries Service listed coho salmon as threatened. 00:00:40.520 --> 00:00:45.740 The Park Service started a project to find out how many fish they had and 00:00:46.080 --> 00:00:49.040 how they were doing within the... the watersheds within the parks. 00:00:49.040 --> 00:00:50.020 [water flowing in a stream] 00:00:50.020 --> 00:00:53.400 As things went on, we learned more and more about the fish and, 00:00:53.400 --> 00:00:55.740 sort of, all the habitats that they used. 00:00:55.740 --> 00:01:00.080 And a lot of the work that we've come up with has shown that these populations in, uh, 00:01:00.080 --> 00:01:05.620 coastal Marin County are, sort of, the southern- most stable populations of coho in their range. 00:01:05.620 --> 00:01:09.240 [water flowing in a stream] 00:01:09.240 --> 00:01:12.000 Coho salmon have always been thought of as being weak 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:16.400 because there are fewer of them around and they're harder to find. 00:01:16.400 --> 00:01:20.420 But, really, what we found in...in watching them is that they're the more aggressive, 00:01:20.420 --> 00:01:23.820 the more dominant fish when you have steelhead and coho together. 00:01:23.820 --> 00:01:26.940 [water flowing in a stream] 00:01:26.940 --> 00:01:31.060 Coho salmon have a, uh, pretty stringent three-year-lifecycle. 00:01:31.060 --> 00:01:35.500 Um, starting from the adult phase, um, November, December, January is... 00:01:35.500 --> 00:01:39.680 is the period of time where the adults come up into the freshwater streams to spawn. 00:01:40.120 --> 00:01:46.140 Um, for the adults, they've spent about six to 18 months out in the ocean 00:01:46.140 --> 00:01:49.920 and they've got about three weeks to enter the freshwater, 00:01:49.920 --> 00:01:55.020 find a place to spawn and, um, do that before they pass away. 00:01:55.020 --> 00:01:59.360 But, if they spawn successfully, the eggs will stay in the gravel 00:01:59.360 --> 00:02:02.540 for about six weeks before they hatch. 00:02:02.540 --> 00:02:06.380 And then, another six weeks, the alevin, or egg sac fry, 00:02:06.380 --> 00:02:10.020 will stay in the gravels before emerging to the water column. 00:02:10.320 --> 00:02:14.940 And, so, it's normally February, late February, early March that we start seeing 00:02:14.940 --> 00:02:20.800 the, um, young of year juveniles come out of the gravel and they populate the pools. 00:02:20.800 --> 00:02:24.040 And they'll spend a full year in the fresh water, so, 00:02:24.040 --> 00:02:28.280 March–April through the next March–April, before they head out to the ocean. 00:02:28.280 --> 00:02:33.600 [water flowing in a stream] 00:02:33.600 --> 00:02:37.540 Steelhead trout they can live anywhere from one to three years in fresh water, 00:02:37.540 --> 00:02:41.760 sometimes four or five, before going out to the ocean. 00:02:41.760 --> 00:02:45.220 They don't need to go to the ocean. The other thing about steelhead trout is 00:02:45.220 --> 00:02:48.660 if they're ocean run, they can come back and spawn and go back out to the ocean. 00:02:48.660 --> 00:02:52.440 So, they're...are some of the fish that actually can spawn multiple years. 00:02:52.440 --> 00:02:57.060 They're able to adjust to changes in the, uh, weather conditions. 00:02:57.060 --> 00:03:01.040 If you have a really bad year, you might lose a lot of the fish in that watershed. 00:03:01.040 --> 00:03:05.420 But that's okay, because maybe some of them will come back and reproduce next year, as well. 00:03:05.420 --> 00:03:09.120 Whereas coho salmon, they're pretty much... they have one chance to reproduce and that's it. 00:03:09.120 --> 00:03:13.720 [water flowing in a stream] 00:03:13.800 --> 00:03:20.400 The redd is a, uh, the egg nest, r e d d, really consists of multiple pockets of eggs. 00:03:20.400 --> 00:03:23.660 The female will lay their eggs and the...the male will, um, 00:03:23.660 --> 00:03:27.080 kind of, broadcast, um, his milt over the eggs. 00:03:27.080 --> 00:03:30.400 And then, the female will go ahead and bury those eggs. 00:03:30.400 --> 00:03:34.020 And if she buries those eggs, she digs a new pit where she can lay more eggs. 00:03:34.020 --> 00:03:39.180 So, a redd is anywhere...sometimes two to four meters long, two to four meters wide, 00:03:39.180 --> 00:03:42.660 so it's a big area where the fish will work the gravel. 00:03:42.660 --> 00:03:47.020 And, basically, within that zone, there are multiple pockets of eggs. 00:03:47.020 --> 00:03:51.140 The typical location for a redd would be, sort of, in this pool tail out section 00:03:51.140 --> 00:03:57.020 where you have a transition from, um, kind of, flat water into a riffle zone. 00:03:57.020 --> 00:04:02.040 And the ideal, or the advantage to that is that the water is accelerating, 00:04:02.040 --> 00:04:04.840 and not just on the surface, but it's accelerating through the gravels. 00:04:04.840 --> 00:04:10.760 So, it's a very good way of delivering oxygen to the eggs, um, while they're in the gravel. 00:04:10.760 --> 00:04:20.200 [water flowing in a stream] 00:04:20.200 --> 00:04:23.940 When we started this work, we were really focused in on...on, uh, 00:04:23.940 --> 00:04:28.580 coho salmon and steelhead, but we found, everywhere we looked, we'd find steelhead and... 00:04:28.580 --> 00:04:34.080 and coho were few and far between. So, we really keyed in on their, uh, their conditions. 00:04:34.080 --> 00:04:43.000 [water flowing in a stream] 00:04:43.000 --> 00:04:48.600 John West Fork is the largest tributary of Olema Creek and, in 1997, we... 00:04:48.600 --> 00:04:53.540 started...looking at that watershed and saying, "Gosh, this has lots of potential." 00:04:53.540 --> 00:04:57.420 [water flowing in a stream] 00:04:57.420 --> 00:05:02.480 There was a culvert along Highway 1 that was really difficult for fish to get through, 00:05:02.480 --> 00:05:04.480 in terms of adult migration. 00:05:04.480 --> 00:05:08.280 [water flowing in a stream] 00:05:08.280 --> 00:05:11.340 So, we're on the John West Fork of Olema Creek. 00:05:11.340 --> 00:05:15.660 And this is a riparian exclusion zone that we constructed in 1997, 00:05:15.660 --> 00:05:18.680 in cooperation with, uh, the local rancher. 00:05:18.680 --> 00:05:24.680 Um, prior to the fence being constructed, the creek bed, itself, looked much like 00:05:24.680 --> 00:05:29.940 the...the area over here, to the left, where we have, um, regular livestock access. 00:05:31.460 --> 00:05:35.900 In cooperation with the rancher, we were able to...to protect the riparian zone. 00:05:35.900 --> 00:05:43.620 Um, but what we need to do is provide, uh, access to other pastures that the, uh, cattle use. 00:05:43.620 --> 00:05:46.300 The cattle have access to the grazing lands. 00:05:46.300 --> 00:05:51.240 We have a riparian zone that we've been working on since '97, 00:05:51.240 --> 00:05:54.200 including a great deal of willow planting 00:05:54.200 --> 00:05:58.860 and some small-scale, um, streambank stabilization structures. 00:05:58.860 --> 00:06:02.560 One of the interesting things is: why are we protecting a dry creek bed? 00:06:02.560 --> 00:06:04.740 And when you're out here in the wintertime 00:06:04.740 --> 00:06:08.280 and there's a great deal of flow coming down this stream channel 00:06:08.280 --> 00:06:11.800 and you see fish swimming up it and spawning, you'll...you'll know why. 00:06:11.800 --> 00:06:17.880 [water flowing in a stream] 00:06:17.880 --> 00:06:20.940 Here at Point Reyes National Seashore, we monitor and study 00:06:20.940 --> 00:06:24.640 coho salmon and steelhead trout as indicators of watershed health. 00:06:25.140 --> 00:06:29.380 The survival of these fish is the survival of California watersheds. 00:06:29.380 --> 00:06:31.840 [water flowing in a stream fades away]