Students Stall Salmon Extinction With Project

Mon., July 5, 1999

The Shoshone-Bannock Tribes’ Indian Summer project is helping high school students hone their science skills while forestalling extinction of several of Idaho’s threatened and endangered species of steelhead and salmon.

During a week-long camping trip that marked the project’s fifth season, students monitored the tribes’ network of 40 incubators in central Idaho streams.

The low-tech incubators are refrigerators converted by ShoBan High School students. Fresh water is piped in and out and box-shaped plastic screens containing hatchery-fertilized eggs are placed in the incubators.

Hatching the fish inside incubators protects them from early predators. Since 1995, when the tribes started using the incubators, hatch rates have averaged 90 percent. That is in contrast to about a 10 percent rate when salmon and steelhead hatch in stream gravel nests called redds.

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Students Stall Salmon Extinction With Project

Jesse Tinsley

Jim Meehan

Molly Quinn

Rob Curley

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