RDCO hosts kokanee salmon spawn celebration – Okanagan

Dozens of tourists descended upon Hardy Falls Regional Park on Saturday, the place the Regional District of Central Okanagan held an academic occasion about kokanee salmon and their distinctive life cycle.

“All through the month of September, you’ve gotten a very nice likelihood to come back right here if not immediately, to absorb these fantastic fish on their life cycle, able to spawn and sort of start their entire cycle once more,” stated Rose Maunder, RDCO occasion planner.

Park interpreters with the RDCO gave excursions alongside Deep Creek Path, the place dozens of individuals discovered how distinctive kokanee salmon are. The freshwater fish have an interesting means of figuring out and remembering precisely the place they have been born. The feminine kokanee presently spawning at Hardy Falls have been born there 4 years in the past, and by some means when it’s their time to put eggs they discover their means again.

“They’re swimming across the lake, they’re tasting the waters of different creeks, they usually’re going to maintain shifting alongside till they style the water that they acknowledge,” described RDCO park interpreter, Risti Lesperance.

“They’re going to acknowledge the way it tastes, the way it smells they usually’re going to know that Deep Creek is the place they’ve to go away and go and spawn.”

The kokanee will wait on the mouth of the creek or stream the place they have been born and know simply by the temperature of the water when it’s time to go away the lake and head upstream, so hotter climate can have an effect on future spawning seasons.

“Spawning may be delayed by a lot of days, by every week, by two weeks, till the fish can sense that the water has cooled down sufficient for them to spawn, however finally even when the fish have sensed that the water continues to be too heat, they’ll solely wait so lengthy,” defined Lesperance.

Lesperance desires to remind everybody that regardless that you may’t at all times see the salmon, they’re really in creeks for about 10 months of the 12 months.

“It’s so essential to recollect to remain out the creeks to remain out of the rivers since you go in there and also you’re crushing salmon eggs which can be within the rocks, you’re trampling on alevins or salmon fry, so from the tip of August to Could, our creeks and streams are residence to salmon,” Lesperance stated.

The RDCO will probably be internet hosting kokanee salmon spawning excursions on weekends from Sept. 10 to Oct. 9 at Mission Creek Regional Park, and on weekends from Aug. 27 to Oct. 9 at Hardy Falls Regional Park.