8-13 SS Fish Kill

 Thousands of fish are dying in the Midwest as the hot, dry summer dries up rivers and causes water temperatures to climb in some spots to nearly 100 degrees. About 40,000 shovelnose sturgeon Recently died in Iowa as water temperatures reached 97 degrees. it’s been hot in the Northwest as well and I wondered if there were any major risks to our fish, most notably sport fish such as trout and steelhead. Here’s Fish and Game official Mike Demick: “When water temperatures get to a certain temperature there is no oxygen in the water and the fish basically die. In Idaho we haven’t had any recent fish kills due to temps. We’ve had problems with turnover killing fish where they run out of oxygen and a lot of times it happens when fertilizers and things like that get flushed into water systems, we get big algae blooms and have had a few fish killed that way but I have not read or heard of anything recently. There has been some talk amongst the fisheries folk that we are not going to be shutting down any waters because of temperatures. Typically what happens is the cool or cold water fish go off the bite. They become very lethargic and just won’t bite and when you look at the whole population level, if we lose a few fish is really no big deal even if we lose some fish, we can’t really justify closing the season on certain streams because of that.