By Lance Frazier
Logan Herald Journal

LOGAN CANYON — You know those holes you’ve fished on the Logan River, the ones that looked so promising yet failed to yield a single trout? Turns out there are fish in there, quite a few of them actually, and Gary Thiede was catching them by the bucketful this week.
Of course Thiede, a researcher in Utah State University’s Department of Watershed Sciences, had the not-insignificant advantage of a car battery hooked up to several prongs that were sending an electrical shock into the water. As the temporarily shocked fish rose to the surface, Thiede’s team of anglers scooped them up and dropped them into buckets in the canoe that served as a mobile base.
“We’re not going to kill the fish, we’re just going to stun them,” Thiede told the group of a dozen students, scientists, Dedicated Hunter volunteers and interested fly fishermen before they entered the water. “We want to pick up everything, including sculpin.”
Soon cries of “Fish!” rang out as surprised cutthroats and browns launched themselves out of the suddenly unfriendly waters, only to be netted by the volunteers, who had to step carefully to keep their footing on the slippery riverbed. The counts are done under “base flow” conditions, when the water is at its lowest point of the year, but the current is still powerful.
The first pass on Tuesday, over a 100-yard-long section of the Logan River near the USU Forestry Camp, netted 149 fish, mostly Bonneville cutthroat trout with a smattering of brown trout and diminutive sculpin. Eventually the fish were weighed and measured, and some were tagged before being released.
Matt Bartley, a wildlife technician at the Logan Fisheries Experiment Station who helped with the count, said the more data the state has on local fish, the better.
“It’s good just to get the background of the whirling disease issue and keep up constant monitoring,” he said. “It’s important to keep that baseline; then if anything does crash, we’ll have data to look back on.”
Another volunteer, Justin Burrup, a resident of Lehi who came up to fulfill a requirement for the Dedicated Hunter program, said he “thought it would be kind of fun to see how this worked.”
All information taken during the counts, which are conducted on 10 sites in the Logan River drainage each summer, will be passed on to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources for analysis, and will be used by USU Professor Phaedra Budy, who is studying whirling disease in the area. Whirling disease is a parasitic infection that attacks trout and salmon, sometimes deforming their spines or causing their tails to turn black, and over the past decade it has spread to virtually every area waterway. The good news, according to Thiede, is that few fish are showing signs of the disease even though local infectivity rates are near 100 percent.
“We’re not seeing a lot of blacktail or other clinical signs,” Thiede said. “The Logan is cold water, and as long as it stays cool, it’s out of that (temperature) range that the (whirling disease) hosts like.”
Budy’s project involves monitoring and evaluating trout in the Logan River. She has documented a slight decrease in Bonneville cutthroats in the river, possibly due in part to competition from non-native brown trout, which are more resistant to whirling disease. The stretch of the Logan River is primarily Bonneville cutthroat trout country, although a few browns do work their way up this high.
The one surprise Thiede found on the group’s first sweep was a high number of large brown trout — “I’ve never seen this many big browns this high up before,” he noted — but he also observed a number of “recaptures,” or fish that had been tagged in earlier sweeps. That indicates that many fish hold in a relatively small area.
“This is excellent information,” Thiede said. “It’s funny, in the Logan, most fish stay where we tag them.”