Was gettin all happy bout a few Hos showing up - after reading that it looks like we may have been simply lucky to have a few Hos show up- or much of anything for a while unless the fish start to eat something else.

Yup pretty much the same stuff we've been hearing for a while. Interested to see the winter and spring returns. The interference with egg development really caught my eye in retrospect to the 2012 kings that had underdeveloped skeins...

http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt438n99wc;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=d0e442&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e442&brand=calisphere
 
"

Spawning Season

The spawning season of trout varies to some extent with the locality and the temperature of the water. By nature, eastern brook and brown trout are fall spawners, while rainbows spawn in the spring (a complete list of the common and scientific names of the salmons and trouts of California is contained in the section The Classification of Fishes). In some California streams with runs of anadromous fishes, such as the Trinity River, there is hardly a month in the year when some strain of fish is not spawning. As an example, spring-spawning king salmon arrive in the upper river section at Lewiston the latter part of June. They are then followed by the summer and fall runs, which extend the salmon spawning season to mid-November. The king salmon runs overlap the silver salmon runs, which extend from November through January. The silvers in turn overlap the steelhead, which spawn during the period January through June. Actually, the steelhead of the Trinity River may be divided into those of the spring run (fish in general entering and migrating upstream on dropping stream levels while quite green, and spawning in the following season), and those of the fall run (fish in general entering on rising stream levels with sexual products in various stages of development, but spawning within the same season).
There are several ways in which the spawning season can be advanced. These include selective breeding, use of artificially controlled light, and injection of pituitary hormones. Selective breeding has been highly effective, and through this process the fall-spawning rainbow commonly referred to as the Hot Creek strain has been developed. Even though selective breeding is a very slow process, the results not being evident until several generations of offspring have been dealt with, the results are permanent and once the strain of fish has been developed it can be perpetuated by proper selection. It has been clearly demonstrated that the spawning time of trout can be advanced by the injection of pituitary hormones; however, this method is still in its infancy and, before the average hatcheryman will be benefited by its use, much needs to be learned regarding it. It offers interesting possibilities for crossbreeding varieties which spawn at different times of the year.
 

Effect of Temperature on Brood Stock and Eggs

Probably no other single thing regulates the development of eggs and growth of fish as much as temperature. It has been shown that rainbow trout reared in water held fairly constant at 60 degrees F. grow in length at the rate of about one inch per month. At 45 degrees F. they grow at less than one-quarter inch per month.
It is quite generally agreed that yearling and adult rainbow can withstand temperatures up to 78 degrees F. for short periods of time without harmful effect. It has also been shown that in order to produce eggs of good quality, rainbow spawners must be held at water temperatures not exceeding 56 degrees F., and preferably not above 54 degrees F., for a period of at least six months before spawning.
In order to get rainbow brood stock to grow rapidly and spawn when two years old, it is common practice to rear them the first 16 months of their life at a location where water temperatures are fairly constant at 60 degrees F., and then to transfer them to a location with a water temperature below 54 degrees F. to mature.
Just as water temperatures which are too warm (higher than 56 degrees) adversely affect egg development in rainbow and king salmon spawners, so do water temperatures which are too cold (42 degrees or lower) affect the development and incubation of trout and salmon eggs. In one experiment in which mature adult king salmon females, nearly ready to spawn, were placed in water ranging from 34 to 38 degrees, none of the females ripened and all died before spawning.
In an attempt to incubate king salmon eggs at a constant 35-degree temperature, mortality was practically 100 percent. Eggs held at water temperatures of 42.5 degrees or higher developed with only normal loss. Salmon eggs which had been held in water slightly above 42 degrees for a period of six days or longer could then tolerate colder temperatures without excessive mortalities. It is safe to say that the eggs of rainbow trout and king salmon will not develop normally in the fish if constant water temperatures above 56 degrees F. are encountered. It also follows that both rainbow trout and king salmon eggs cannot be incubated in water below 42 degrees F. without excessive loss."
 
Just to offer a sense of how variable all of this is, and how little of it is " written in stone," and how many factors there are that can influence when one or the majority of any population develop to any point.
 
Maybe the cohos are noticeable in years when there are low numbers of steelhead, and not so noticeable in years of high numbers of steelhead.  There are a LOT of variables to try to juggle.

GVod read. you know this past summer the water temp really did not get above 70 until late and it was not for too long. Based on the article aboVe it seems as if natural repro for steelhead is not completely out of the question for the Salmon River. especially since we have rainbows spawning from November till as late as early June as we saw last year. how about the Kings from 2012 lucky? In which most of all I saw had 1 underdeveloped skein and 1 regularly developEd skein....

I'm still looking, have not found anything about relative size of the skeins.  But these fish are also carrying a body burden of known contaminants related to endocrine system disruption, mutagenicity (mutations), teratogenicity (deformities), and carcinogenicity (cancer, or tumor formation), so maybe a lot of kings got a higher dose that year.  I think if it were systemic (all the hens ) we might have heard something from DEC about needing to take more fish to get sufficient eggs.  Or maybe the skeins develop at different rates, and by the time the hens ripened , they were carrying the full load.  As I recall, you are generally harvesting very early and very low in the river, so if there were differential development, you might only see one skein where the eggs have filled out.  I know I have close friends who ran a bait store and bought all the skein or loose eggs they could get, and they never mentioned anything about this from the Genesee and other Tribs in Western NY. 
 
But I'll keep looking, I don't have a salmon anatomy and physiology text in my library so I have to do the webcrawl.
 
Another thing that you notice about science when you have worked with it long enough is there is nearly always an exception to every rule. 

Yes early and low is correct. They didn't come til late labor day that year. Fished steadily til 3rd wee September and the later part just helped friends and family mostly. I like my salmon silver :) and I have always been a firm believer in exceptions to the rules with everything. Kinda what keeps me going.

Have yinz seen this story.............................
 
Somewhere on the North Fork of Idaho’s Clearwater River is a rainbow trout weighing at least 28 pounds–or about 8 pounds heavier than the state record for the species.
Larry Warren, who knew that he had a possible record-breaker on the line during a recent fishing trip with a buddy, was compelled to release the fish because it was protected under state law.
“I knew that it could potentially be a state record when it came 2 feet out of the water,” Warren told the Coeur d’Alene Press. “It took a 70-yard run up the river.”
The 55-year-old angler noticed after landing the trout that it had an intact adipose fin. The state mandates that rainbow trout with an unclipped adipose fin must be released.
 
Any mandates like this in your home state?
 
 
 

Rainbow trout (or steelhead if they run to salt, and some get up into Idaho on the Clearwater) are native fish on the west coast, and in many States have been listed as endangered species, mandating release, and in some places closing rivers to angling.  Hatchery fish are all clipped, and this is what anglers are allowed to retain.  In NYS , all rainbow trout or steelhead, whether products of the hatcheries (Randolph for the "domestic" rainbow strains, the stocky, redder fish, and Altmar for the Chambers Creek silver bullets and Skamanias) or produced from spawning in the wild, are exotics, invasive species in some lexicons, and some would argue that they, and other introduced exotics like Brown trout, King Salmon and Coho salmon, should all be removed to enhance the possibility of reestablishment of the native salmonids, of which there are three, other than the whitefishes, Lake Trout (or, more accurately, Lake Char), Salvelinus namycush;  Brook Trout ,(or Brook char), Salvelinus fontinalis; and Atlantic Salmon (actually a trout), Salmo Salar.   Of course, reestablishment of these natives would also require elimination of myriad lower trophic level exotics, called invasive species because they are nuisances, and were for the most part not intentionally introduced, like alewife, rainbow smelt, spiny and spinier water fleas, and zebra and quagga mussels, to mention a few of over 180 in LO, and that is highly unlikely.  The Fish Community Objectives developed by NYSDEC and Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (OMNR) and on the DEC Website detail this problem and the management actions developed in recognition of this problem, and the risks associated with the actions, in great detail.  (http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/fish_marine_pdf/lopublic2012.pdf; this is a draft but is likely very close to what was submitted to the Great Lakes Commission) The major management action is stocking of all these exotic sportfish, primarily as controls on the alewife population, but with the secondary benefit of promoting the sportfishing economy.  I think it would be kind of hard to justify "catch and release only" fishing for a non-native species, at least without quantifying the contribution of in-stream reproduction to the maintenance of the overall population and fishery, and that has not been done yet, hopefully in the next few years when they get the Coho evaluation done, or as a form of crowd control as we have in the fly only zones on the upper Salmon.  But a 28 pounder in the Clearwater could be a huge part of the ongoing efforts to restore the native steelhead and pacific salmon runs to the level at which they were historically encountered, and would certainly be a valuable part of the gene pool, having reached that size.

 
 
 

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