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My guess is the coded wire tag will prove the fish to come from an Indiana hatchery, stocked in the St. Joe where it lived most of it's life in Michigan waters and then was caught in the Michigan part of the river. Another win for Indiana Salmon Stamp buyers! But I'm just getting snarky again. Haven't finished my first cup of coffee this morning.

Thank you all that inputted data here. I think it's safe to say that most of us if not all are done entering data for 2015.

This is a great data collection tool, and we will be doing this again for the years to follow in order to generate a data series of natural kings year to year.

Just got this from Ben at the DNR. Pretty amazing how close the data is guys!

I’ve been following the sticky on thesouthend as members report their kings and fin clips. Now that our field season is completely over, I have some preliminary data at this time (not yet quality controlled and analyzed by the USFWS) that I thought might be of interest to those that participated.

Thesouthend’s numbers on chinooks in 2015:
Wild - 82 67.2%
Stocked - 40 32.8%

The preliminary data is from the USFWS headhunters operating out of Indiana (they covered East Chicago, Burns Harbor, and Michigan City primarily, but also made a few trips to St. Joseph and South Haven). They took biodata from 3,348 fish this year, including length, weight, stomach samples, muscle tissue samples, fin clips, and aging structures (scales, otoliths, and coded wire tags).

Of the 307 chinooks that were collected from the open water fishery (not pierhead/stream) in a statistically valid manner, the percentage came out to 67.1% wild and 32.9% stocked, which is nearly identical to your guys’ poll.

It is nice to see, although not surprising, that the headhunter data on chinook fin clips aligns so closely with the data on thesouthend, given the sample sizes and the fact that it appears as if anglers entered their data similarly to how the headhunters collect it. Hopefully this will boost angler confidence and trust in the validity of the USFWS mass marking reports. The Mass Marking Program is crucial to management of the salmonid fishery and without the information it provides, there is no way of knowing how strong wild recruitment is on a year-to-year basis.

If any of the anglers that participated in thesouthend.org poll would like to provide their data to a management agency for scientific use, they can contact Dan O’Keefe at the Michigan SeaGrant, he runs a program called Salmon Ambassadors for anglers to provide useful data for managing the fishery. I myself am a participant, it is pretty simple. www.miseagrant.umich.edu/explore/fisheries/salmon-ambassadors/


As always, if you or other forum members have some questions I can help answer all you have to do is email

That is pretty cool!!

yes very cool

Thanks for the info on the Salmon Ambassador program. I shot Mr. O'Keefe an email and he promptly responded with all of the information about data collection and reporting for 2016, which seems to be very straight forward and simple. I let him know about TheSouthEnd site and the online wild vs. stocked survey you guys put together for this year.

Good deal - Thank You Spoon-Fed