KPLU: Stillaguamish Tribe monitors fish after deadly mudslide

As the search for victims of the Oso mudslide continues, scientists are monitoring its effects on endangered fish runs.

The cloudiness of the Stillaguamish River due to sediment washing down after the slide is a big concern. But it looks like initial fears of devastation are giving way to optimism.

At river mile 6, upstream from where the Stillaguamish meets the ocean and several miles downstream from the slide, a large screw-shaped waterwheel on a barge slowly turns, pulling baby fish from the river into an 8-foot-long trap. Biologists have been counting smolts here since 2001.

“So there’s a couple chum and some pink and a Chinook salmon in there,” said Jason Griffith, a fisheries biologist with the Stillaguamish Tribe.

Griffith oversees the young technicians at work aboard the smolt trap. They catalogue hundreds of tiny fish each week and measure them before letting them go back on their way out to sea.