Kokanee anglers can rest easy. Ririe Reservoir doesn’t have a predator problem targeting the prized fish.
That’s the conclusion of a recent Idaho Fish and Game survey of fish populations at the reservoir.
Each year, Idaho Fish and Game plants thousands of the land-locked salmon into the reservoir for anglers to catch. This year, the department stocked nearly 240,000 kokanee during the month of May in the reservoir.
One worry, though, has been the presence of walleye, a fish that sometimes focuses on gobbling up kokanee. Walleye were illegally introduced to the reservoir and discovered there in 2008. Fish and Game began an annual fall monitoring program shortly afterward. So far, what they’ve found is the walleye population has remained low – less than 1% of the game fish – and stable. Because the numbers were consistently low, fisheries biologists switched to monitoring the walleye numbers every three years. The last survey was done in 2017.
“I honestly had no expectations because it had been such a (time) gap, we didn’t really know if we were going to see a boom in their abundance,” said Fish and Game fisheries biologist John Heckel. “It's just remained low. … That's kind of reassuring to know that there aren’t thousands of walleye in the reservoir that are eating all the kokanee.”
Fish and Game monitors the fish each fall by setting up gill nets at various depths and in various locations, in the same places year after year.
The nets hauled in mostly perch, several kokanee and trout and only three walleye.
“We were hoping to see a low abundance of walleye and that occurred,” Heckel said. “That didn’t even make up 1% of our game fish catch. They weren’t big either. They were smaller fish, which is an indication that there was some natural reproduction occurring with the walleye, but by no means are they abundant.”
He said the yellow perch made up 77% of the survey, with the rest being kokanee and Yellowstone cutthroat trout. The kokanee measured in the 10- to 12-inch range and the perch at sizes up to 10 inches.
Fish and Game does a specific kokanee monitoring in Ririe Reservoir each June, but the results of this fall survey bode well for winter ice fishing, Heckel said.
“They will make their presence for the ice fishery this winter,” he said. “There's a ton of perch out there. They are readily available for anglers through the ice. I've been hearing that folks have been doing really well catching perch up near Blacktail (park) right now.”
He said perch fishing is fun, easy and appeals to kids. Kokanee, though, can be more challenging.
“Kokanee can be a little bit harder because in the summertime they are at a certain depth and you have to have your bait at that depth,” Heckel said. “Fishing for kokanee this winter should be pretty good. It's different than perch because you have to wait for the school of kokanee to swim by your hole. Whereas the perch fishing, especially through the ice, you can be pretty confident that you can get into some fish.”
Ririe Reservoir is one of the last in eastern Idaho to freeze, Heckel said, usually freezing over by January.
November 11, 2020 at 05:30AM
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Fish survey on Ririe Reservoir bodes well for kokanee anglers - Post Register
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