State and tribal fisheries crews will begin four weeks of setline surveys for young white sturgeon on Lake Roosevelt starting September 14, working from Rickey Point in the upper portion of the reservoir upstream toward the Little Dalles, according to the schedule posted for the survey.
The work is a cooperative effort of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Spokane Tribe of Indians and the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Crews will run two boats on weekdays, deploying 10 setlines per survey day, each roughly 600 feet long with hooks designed for juvenile sturgeon. Lines are left overnight and retrieved the following morning. The surveys overlap with the Lake Roosevelt white sturgeon season.
The reservoir’s white sturgeon population has been unable to sustain itself without help for decades. Adult fish can spawn, but the young rarely survive more than a few weeks in the wild, leaving natural reproduction well below replacement. Without intervention, biologists have concluded that the population would collapse as adults died off.
The recovery effort is anchored by a hatchery program that first began in British Columbia in 2001 and expanded to Washington in 2004. Wild adult sturgeon are collected and spawned in hatchery settings, and juveniles are grown for months before release into the reservoir. The program is managed by the Spokane Tribe, which contracts with the Colville Confederated Tribes and Washington fisheries staff to complete assigned tasks.
The setline surveys target juvenile fish, defined for this work as sturgeon four years old and younger, and are designed to measure survival and growth of released cohorts. Weekly rotations move up-reservoir through defined reaches: the first week runs from Rickey Point to the Colville River, then upstream to the Highway 395 bridge, and on to Singers Bay and the Pingston Creek and Nancy Creek reach. Subsequent weeks progress through Marcus Island, Evans, North Gorge and the Little Dalles.
The upper Columbia white sturgeon population, which includes the Lake Roosevelt reach, has been the subject of long-standing recovery planning across the U.S.-Canada border. In August 2006, the Canadian government listed the upper Columbia population as endangered under its federal species-at-risk law, and low numbers on the Washington side of the transboundary reach have driven fishing closures and hatchery releases in parallel.
