On this episode of The Barbless Fly Fishing Podcast, Chad Alderson and Nick Hanna interview Jason Kindopp, Senior Environmental Scientist for the Department of Water Resources (DWR). Jason works on the Feather River, with his crew of 20’s focus being on the Oroville Dam.

After studying biology at California State University, Chico (CSUC) in the 1990’s, Jason got interested in fisheries. Incidentally, he got hooked on fly fishing during this time period. Jason completed his graduate work at CSUC as well, looking at Chinook Salmon populations on the Feather River and Butte Creek. He began a job on the Feather River working with Salmonids while writing his thesis.

In Jason’s current role, his job is to monitor health of the river with the health of salmonids in mind. The crew changes flows in ways that are beneficial to the system and the fish, and figure out the operations side of things. The department is constantly learning about hatcheries, and modify their methods based on the data.

Hear how Auto fish tagging trailers have transformed the way fish data is collected.

Dirty Jobs-DWR-Episode on Amazon, Season 2 episode 6.

Newsletter that talked about the episode (page 24).

Listen up for Jason’s perspective on how spawning behavior has changed over the last 10 years, the ways that hatchery strategies have changed over time, and of course the striper debate. Jason also gives some food for thought on different areas that could be explored as fisheries. Stay tuned for some fun tidbits, like how you can tell a Fish’s age by their ear bones.

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