Idaho Meetings Continue

Do anglers want to keep fishing regulations simple, or endure size limits and other technical rules designed to allow more fishing opportunity?

This and other questions are being posed by Idaho Fish and Game Department officials at public meetings that continue this week in the Panhandle.

The department is asking anglers for opinions on whether to:

Manage more of the St. Joe and Coeur d’Alene drainages under catch-and-release.

Maintain Jewel Lake as a quality trout fishery and applying the same rules to Bonner Lake.

Stock walleyes in Hauser Lake

Return Priest River below Priest Lake to year-round season.

Reduce kokanee limit on Lake Pend Oreille to two fish a day.

Public meetings to consider these and other proposals for the 1996-1997 seasons will begin at 7 p.m. as follows:

Tonight, Fish and Game Department offices in Coeur d’Alene.

June 12, Sandpoint Senior Center.

June 13, Clark Fork High School.

June 14, Washington Water Power in St. Maries.

June 15, Community Center in Avery.

June 16, Washington Water Power in Kellogg.

Disease detected

Whirling disease has been detected in Clark Fork River trout east of Missoula - the first time the fish-killing disease has been documented west of the Continental Divide.

One of 47 adult rainbow trout collected below Milltown Dam has tested positive for whirling disease, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) officials.

Whirling disease is a parasitic infection that is thought responsible for a 90-percent decline in rainbow trout populations in the famed Madison River fishery.

Larry Peterman, fisheries division chief in Helena, said researchers will collect a number of juvenile rainbows from below Milltown Dam and have them tested in an attempt to reconfirm the presence of the disease and determine its extent in the river.

Since the discovery of whirling disease in the Madison last December, the FWP has undertaken an all-out effort to expand trout population monitoring and testing to all river basins in the state.

In addition to its initial discovery in the Madison, the disease has been found in Blaine Spring Creek, the Ruby River, Poindexter Slough in the Beaverhead River drainage, Willow Creek in the Jefferson River drainage and in a small spring that feeds the Red Rock River about one-half mile south of Clark Canyon Reservoir.

New heights for program

Fish-rearing facilities on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford site are growing the largest number of fish in the history of the program.

The Yakima Indian Nation has delivered 700,000 fingerling fall chinook salmon to the facilities where the fish will grow for about a month and a half before they are released into the Columbia River.

Other species raised in the facility, which was transformed from a surplus water purification plant, include white sturgeon, channel catfish and rainbow trout.

The facility is expected to expand from its three-year experimental stage into a full-scale fish production operation over the next few years.

, DataTimes