Looking Up Hatchery Origin

Ever catch a Chinook and come back to a boat ramp just to have a sampler wand the fish with a metal detector like at the airport? Maybe there was something in there and they chopped off the head before you got to take a picture? Well, these samplers are looking for CWT (Coded Wire Tags). CWTs very small pieces of wire that have a number engraved with a laser, this number is unique to each release of salmon and has data associated with it like (number of fish released, how many were tagged, which hatchery the fish came from, etc...). This information is used to see the stock composition of a fishery and is vital to fishery management.

Fortunately, although you lost the head of your fish you can look up where the fish came from. If you ask the sampler for the 'snout label number' it should look something like CWTXXXXXXXX and go to this website:

https://data.wa.gov/Natural-Resources-Environment/WDFW-Coded-Wire-Tag-Fish-Recoveries/auvb-4rvk/data

You can enter that number in the Bag Label field as shown here:



Hit enter and if the tag has been read (this can take weeks to months depending on season) the hatchery and most information associated with the tag should be available.


Fish hard.

Good info.

For those that don't know the other type of tag you can commonly find in salmon and steelhead are PIT tags. Take the tour it's interesting.  https://www.ptagis.org/learn/tour

The cool thing about PIT tags is you can instantly find out information on your fish when you enter it online (just ask the bio for the number if they scan one).  https://www.ptagis.org/data/quick-reports/complete-tag-history

Unlike CWTs, PIT tags are read electronically so you don't necessarily need to kill the fish to read them.  They can also be read as the fish is swimming by.  There are hundreds of in stream "readers" set up throughout the Columbia system.  PATAGIS can provide excellent info on where to fish.  For example it's easy to check where all the tagged steelhead that crossed Bonneville in the last week are probably headed to.  I could spend hours playing with the report data.  https://www.ptagis.org/data/quick-reports/adult-ladder-detections

They should put a tag in the belly as well, so that they can track the salmon that are snacked on by the fir bags.  If a fir bag eats a fish with a tag, and the tag gets detected by the tag management group now found in the fir bag, it gets turned into boots!   

I think all the Columbia FBs would be turned into boots.

When PIT tagging smaller fish the tag IS implanted in the abdominal cavity.  It's common to have PIT tags show up in predators....smallmouth, catfish, walleye, birds.  If you've ever participated in the Pikeminnow program they scan your catch for PIT tagged smolt.

Yup, PIT tags are common in studies involving fish passage and movement. Due to the close proximity needed for the receiver they're commonly used on rivers and especially fish ladders. I've created graphs with PIT data plotted over tidal curves to graphically display the movement if cutthroat entering and leaving streams.

I don't think RMIS data is easily available to the public but it is a vast resource for CWT data. You can select a hatchery and brood year and it'll spit out a graph of the recoveries all over the west coast.

You guys are starting to make this fishing thing seam harder then work........
 KNOCK IT OFF ALREADY YOUR GIVING ME A MIGRAINE  

I now return you to your regularly scheduled intellectual fish data discussion.

Fish hard.