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When Tom Mclellan stopped by a park close to Lengthy Lake Dam final Wednesday to let his canine run, he noticed one thing uncommon within the water: plenty of lifeless fish, their white bellies turned towards the sky.
“We might simply sit there and actually watch them float by,” Mclellan mentioned.
Mclellan, who labored at Lengthy Lake Dam for 30 years earlier than retiring in 2022, let folks on the dam know what he had seen. Later, he posted a video to Fb that confirmed scads of small fish floating belly-up alongside the shoreline.
Fisheries biologists are estimating 1000’s of fish died, making the incident the biggest fish kill in that a part of the Spokane River system in latest reminiscence.
The trigger stays a thriller, and fisheries officers from the Washington Division of Fish and Wildlife and the Spokane Tribe are attempting to resolve it.
Chris Donley, Division of Fish and Wildlife’s Japanese area fish program supervisor, mentioned Monday morning that many of the fish had been discovered near Lengthy Lake Dam, which impounds the Spokane River west of Tumtum. Their our bodies had been discovered each above and beneath the dam.
He mentioned officers have dominated out the commonest consider fish kills — low ranges of dissolved oxygen — they usually’re ready on take a look at outcomes to see if illness, bodily harm or some kind of contaminant is the perpetrator.
“The entire thing is puzzling,” Donley mentioned.
Rebecca Cook dinner, a biologist with the Spokane Tribe’s fisheries division, mentioned they’ve “some preliminary concepts” based mostly on bubbles noticed on among the fish, however they want affirmation from lab exams earlier than naming a particular trigger.
Samples have been despatched to the Washington Animal Illness Diagnostic Laboratory. Cook dinner mentioned she expects to have outcomes this week.
The dying seems to be over for now. Cook dinner mentioned a workforce of people that went to the lake Monday didn’t discover any new lifeless fish.
The kill got here somewhat greater than a month after an oil sheen was noticed on the river. The supply was decided to be mineral oil spilled by the Inland Empire Paper Co., in accordance with the Division of Ecology. Inland Empire Paper Co. is owned by Cowles Co., which additionally publishes The Spokesman-Evaluation.
Ecology officers mentioned the mineral oil just isn’t thought of dangerous to folks or aquatic organisms, and Donley mentioned Monday there doesn’t look like a transparent hyperlink between that spill and the lifeless fish.
No fish had been discovered lifeless alongside the Spokane River between the Millwood plant and 9 Mile Dam after the spill, and the fish seen final week had been many miles downstream.
“I don’t suppose we are able to tie it to that,” Donley mentioned.
Lengthy Lake had been rising within the days earlier than the die off. Avista Utilities had ended its annual drawdown of the reservoir to permit it to fill, and snowmelt and rain swelled the river and bumped water ranges behind the reservoir.
That’s regular for this time of yr, in accordance with Jared Webley, an Avista spokesperson. He mentioned the corporate hasn’t been doing something out of the extraordinary this winter, and has carried out annual drawdowns and fills for years and “by no means had this sort of fish kill earlier than.”
Donley mentioned there had been stories of lifeless fish in the identical space in late December, however that the Division of Fish and Wildlife hadn’t obtained any further stories of lifeless fish till final week.
A lot of the fish affected had been walleye and perch, with some salmonid species comparable to whitefish and trout combined in. The majority of them had been near Lengthy Lake Dam, Donley mentioned, and some have been reported at Little Falls Dam — the subsequent impoundment downstream.
Donley added that the fish affected had been principally 3 years previous or youthful, which suggests they’re usually not the scale that anglers would catch and take residence. Nonetheless, if sufficient younger fish have been killed, it “positively impacts harvest sooner or later,” he mentioned.
Jule Schultz, the waterkeeper for the Spokane Riverkeeper, mentioned a fish kill of this magnitude hasn’t occurred in latest reminiscence.
“We do not know why this occurred,” Schultz mentioned. “What we do know is that this gave the impression to be a really massive occasion.”
Riverkeeper workers went to Lengthy Lake and took a water pattern after studying of the stories of lifeless fish. Schultz mentioned they noticed murky, turbid water with some particles, however that alone doesn’t provide any clarification for the kill.
“It’s plenty of fish, and that is uncommon,” Schultz mentioned. “If it does point out an issue with our river, we have to observe that down and determine it out.”
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