“Salmon are a cultural icon of the Pacific Northwest,” Christopher Caudill, associate professor of fisheries in the College of Natural Resources, said. “They’re an endangered species, so one of the concerns is that by not having fish in the landscape and not having people experience salmon, we’re losing that cultural heritage of the Pacific Northwest and for the First Nations tribes.”
Caudill began his work with the University of Idaho in 2003 on a postdoc project studying fish migration, specifically endangered species of salmon and steelhead trout, in damns on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Throughout the years, Caudill and his students conducted research projects that identified troublesome areas within the migratory paths, implemented processes to combat these issues and evaluated the effectiveness of their solutions.
“I’ve been leading the Fish Ecology Research Lab since 2008,” Caudill said. “We have 15 to 30 people in four different states, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Montana. We’ve radio tagged almost 30,000 adult salmon.”
Caudill is also researching the Pacific Lamprey, or “ninja vampire snake fish” he affectionately refers to them, which have a very similar life cycle to salmon despite being nocturnal. Like salmon, Pacific Lamprey migrate to the ocean as juveniles, mature in the salt water, but come back to fresh water to spawn. Lampreys are also a first food of the Pacific Northwest tribes.
While Caudill’s research is mainly conducted in the field, nestled in the College of Natural Resources is the Aquaculture Research Institute, home to two wet laboratories that have controlled tanks to study fish care, feeding and diseases.
“Whether they’re destined for a dinner plate or a reservoir for someone to go fishing in, our goal is to grow healthier fish,” Luke Oliver, PhD student in the College of Natural Resources, said.
Part of Oliver’s research has focused on the repopulation of burbot within the Kootenay River.
“There were less than 50 harvestable individuals in the whole system,” Oliver said. “Originally burbot came to UI because their population was nearly extirpated in the wild, and the Kootenai Tribe of north Idaho relied on them traditionally as a sustenance fish.”
For over a decade, researchers within the College of Natural Resources in partnership with the Kootenai Tribe and Bonneville Power conducted studies to determine the most effective and sustainable way to grow burbot, which included how to get them to reproduce in captivity, how to grow eggs and larvae and what to feed them in order to start stocking them in the wild.
“This research led to the burbot fishery which had been closed since 1991, being able to open again in 2019,” Oliver said. “And now we’re looking at trying to make burbot a commercial aquaculture species.”
Whether studying in the field or in the wet labs, the studies that have been and are currently still in production by researchers at the College of Natural Resources are sustainably managing fish and wildlife populations for the balance of the ecosystem and the food sources of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest.
