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[url=https://www.facebook.com/lakemichigan.basincoordinator?__cft__[0]=AZWWCFMN9t1W4bkGVY7mRBuz7wtZxIcv2XRcsQdLgJ2JyYAIQcekINVCY9Jw_sc7ak97dguo2CFSCHvimO4Vwx5hwVxDwwIwgNnXnZJC0ivF0UzoMo2ZfBPMEqWu8R-n6kkEkOeKDShbbgA7oEukik1LVC4-SrrxnIwBLJ95JadX_xyE07Wlw5sKX13AdfaTcMHXjOdKkOgYF7P_ek7nEOXDLSAAI9wPs3dieWQ1f9fDTQ&__tn__=-UC%2CP-y-R]Jay Wesley[/url]
[url=https://www.facebook.com/lakemichigan.basincoordinator/posts/pfbid0kitQBqZ5Qh8Famvqo5APKetpcMrm2KcBSPEZS5Bfka4qwDfC5iUij9Dsbu2JMNLl?__cft__[0]=AZWWCFMN9t1W4bkGVY7mRBuz7wtZxIcv2XRcsQdLgJ2JyYAIQcekINVCY9Jw_sc7ak97dguo2CFSCHvimO4Vwx5hwVxDwwIwgNnXnZJC0ivF0UzoMo2ZfBPMEqWu8R-n6kkEkOeKDShbbgA7oEukik1LVC4-SrrxnIwBLJ95JadX_xyE07Wlw5sKX13AdfaTcMHXjOdKkOgYF7P_ek7nEOXDLSAAI9wPs3dieWQ1f9fDTQ&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-y-R]5d[/url]  · 
I must eat crow.
My prediction was that the 47.86 pound Michigan and Great Lakes record Chinook salmon was age 3 or 4.
It was 5 years old accordingly to otolith aging.
Very cool!
Most age 5 kings that I have seen were slow growers.
This one was growing good and decided to stay 1 to 2 years longer in Lake Michigan.
Thank you Dan Traynor for aging this fish.
"Copied from Capt Chucks facebook page"

Like Jay, I was also very surprised it was so old. 


Very unusual to begin with. The Mass Marking program has looked at a boatload of chinooks. Nearly 70,000 fish with assigned ages. They've aged 62 as 5-year olds. 

For known age (coded wire tags) they have 12  5-year olds

And usually when a chinook bypasses running as a 2 or 3 year old, it's because it is slow growing and didn't get big enough to put energy toward eggs/milt, and tends to be on the small side. Not big like this fish. A true freak!

On the aged or wire tagged 5yr olds was there weight or length and girth data collected? Just wondering if they were 30#+ category or teens low twenties?

For the coded wire tags (for sure known to be age 5, rather than aging error)

The 12 fish combined averaged 35.9 inches, and ranged between 26 and 41 inches. Most were in the mid-30s for length.

They averaged 16.8 pounds and ranged between 6.5 and 24 pounds. Most were in the mid to high teens.

Clear something up for me please. When Jay said in that Facebook post that the fish was a 5 year old, was he saying it was a 4+ aged fish in "angler parlance" or a 5+ aged fish in "fish biologist" parlance?  Though it's been 50+ years since I looked at otolith sections when I was at Purdue, the photo of the record fish's otolith appeared to me as though it was a 5+.  I would guess that would make the record fish even more rare since I would presume any salmon living past 3+ in the Great Lakes to become 4+ is rare, so living past 4+  to be a 5+ would make it extra rare. 

(For the benefit of many, most of the kings in the Great Lakes spawn and die just before or after their fourth birthday. Many anglers, when they catch one of these maturing fish in the summer leading up to their birthday/spawn/death, call that fish a four year old. The majority of these big, healthy kings are not actually four years old in the summer months since they'd not reached their fourth birthday, which would be in September/October/November. Biologists either refer to these fish as 3-year-olds or sometime 3+ year olds.)  




 

I never thought about them being born later in the year! Years ago we always referred to them as 4 year olds! Thank you for the info

I got an email from Jay Wesley about the record king. He said it was a 5+ fish. "Normal is fish that spawn as 3+ fish (what fishermen call four year olds).  So this fish skipped it's normal spawning season, skipped spawning as a 4+ fish and skipped spawning as a 5+ fish.  It had been in the lake two extra years.  

 

I see you already got a reply from Jay, but you were correct, it was an actual 5+ fish. Very rare thing. Usually the older fish are slow growing ones, because fast-growing fish typically hit all their cues that say "you should develop gonads and go spawn, you're doing great!".  Whereas the slow growing fish hold off for another year 

BNature wrote:

Clear something up for me please. When Jay said in that Facebook post that the fish was a 5 year old, was he saying it was a 4+ aged fish in "angler parlance" or a 5+ aged fish in "fish biologist" parlance?  Though it's been 50+ years since I looked at otolith sections when I was at Purdue, the photo of the record fish's otolith appeared to me as though it was a 5+.  I would guess that would make the record fish even more rare since I would presume any salmon living past 3+ in the Great Lakes to become 4+ is rare, so living past 4+  to be a 5+ would make it extra rare. 

(For the benefit of many, most of the kings in the Great Lakes spawn and die just before or after their fourth birthday. Many anglers, when they catch one of these maturing fish in the summer leading up to their birthday/spawn/death, call that fish a four year old. The majority of these big, healthy kings are not actually four years old in the summer months since they'd not reached their fourth birthday, which would be in September/October/November. Biologists either refer to these fish as 3-year-olds or sometime 3+ year olds.)  





 

Ben:  Do you think there's a possible genetic component to delayed spawning?  For instance, the Kenai River in Alaska and the Campbell River in BC routinely produce extra-ordinary sized kings and from what I've been lead to believe it's because the strains that are native to these stream routinely (genetically?) live to be 5+ or 6+ years of age and the genetics haven't been diluted much extent by hatchery fish.  My point, I guess is that while the eggs used by Michigan and Indiana for the hatcheries are a mixed-genetics from 2+ and 3+ aged parents. No one knows where the Michigan record fish was born and how many generations away from its hatchery-spawned ancestors.  

Was that the intent of the triploid experiment about 40 years ago?