Two Colorado Division of Wildlife biologists, aided by students from a wildlife-management class at Fort Lewis College, on Tuesday stood knee-deep in Grimes Creek squirting eggs from female salmon and sperm from male salmon into plastic containers.

The students had helped net the fish at a weir, an obstruction placed in a stream to divert water, that was built on Sept. 25 across Grimes Creek just north of the reservoir. Once fish are netted, they are transferred to a netted enclosure just downstream. There, DOW aquatic biologist Jim White and Riley Morris, assistant manager of the DOW hatchery in Durango, stripped the females of their eggs, called roe, and the males of their sperm, called milt.

The containers of mixed eggs and sperm would be taken to the hatchery.

"We'll care for them over the winter," White said. "The young kokanee will be about 2 inches long next April when we restock them here."

The late-fall ritual - the overall goal of which is to increase the kokanee population - has been occurring for more than 25 years, White said.

Last spring, 150,000 kokanee fingerlings were stocked in Grimes Creek and 350,000 in neighboring Vallecito Creek. The stocked kokanee imprint on their home and, after spending three or four years in Vallecito Reservoir, return to the tributaries to spawn.

In 2003, the year after the Missionary Ridge Fire, the kokanee population was wiped out by runoff from the burned hills, White said. But the kokanee population is known to fluctuate in response to predation or water quality, and sonar surveys show a normal population.

Hal Shoemaker isn't so sure.

Human intervention in kokanee propagation is needed, said Shoemaker, a 19-year resident of this community and a volunteer in kokanee projects.

"This has been the worst year for kokanee," he said. "If they're in the reservoir, they're not being caught."

After giving up their reproductive substances, the kokanee were tossed into a steel-mesh cage to await the arrival of a state veterinarian who will check them for diseases.

Kokanee stripping is just one of several hands-on projects for her 19 wildlife-management students, said FLC biology professor Catherine Ortega.

The students, Ortega said, have banded birds and tried to trap a bear. They've also learned first-hand about radio telemetry collars used to monitor deer, beaver trapping and a river-restoration project near Redmesa.

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