July 17,2019 

Alex took us to Klamath fisheries and water laboratory where he talked about the dams and how they want to get rid of them so some of the fish can come up stream. He also mentioned that the lost river sucker and the short nose sucker is endangered. The oldest fish they have found was about 50  years old (lost river sucker) and for the short nose sucker was about 30 years old, you can tell how old the fish are by looking at their scale under a microscope and it has little rings (like a tree) that you can count and it’ll tell you. The short nose sucker fish can live up to 33 years old and get 35 inches long. Females produce about 44,000 to 218,000 eggs.

Adults deposit eggs in gravel bottoms. Most of the fish know where they spawn so every year they go back to lay eggs. 

Jeff Mitchell arrived at our camp in the evening. He welcomed us with a song. After which he began sharing a little bit about how the sucker fish were made and why they stopped harvesting them and why they celebrate it. His granddaughter who is a PhD student, also shared that she helped plan the projects for the national forest and had a Gates Millennium scholarship. It was a great experience to learn more about the Klamath ways and to hear the songs they sing and the different names they say for the roots, fish, and how the water levels are changing.