Mr. Chair, yes, we can, and thank you for inviting us to provide our knowledge and experience in support of the endangered southern resident killer whales and all the fisheries, all of which are dependent on healthy chinook populations.
I'm an owner-operator of Omega Pacific Hatchery. We're located in the centre of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, the centre of southern resident killer whale chinook country.
My extensive work has been with the provincial fisheries, as well as past federal fisheries hatcheries and private hatcheries. My 38-year career has been dedicated to chinook culture excellence.
In 1987, we built Omega Pacific hatchery, situated on the southern shore of Great Central Lake. This site has a remarkable cold-water supply, and there are no fish upstream, so it is disease free. This was conducive to growing a one-year-old, stream-type overwintering chinook.
Our natural slow-growth process results in a more physiologically competent smolt, has the identical life history of coho and is consistent with documented findings of wild yearling chinooks throughout Vancouver Island streams. The chinook eggs hatch and emerge in April and May at half a gram, slowly grow for an additional year in cold-water conditions and are released the following April.
With me is Mr. Brian Tutty, a DFO habitat biologist having 33 years' experience, who trapped and discovered overwintering chinook in the upper Fraser River during the McGregor hydro project and Nechako investigations. He has written a report, and in it cautioned that stream-type chinook were likely underpraised as contributors to the B.C. fisheries and that SEP should consider this important chinook life history within its planned Fraser hatchery development program.
Since then I've been consulting with Brian, and Brian has been consulting with us and providing additional advice to Mr. Chris Bos and me, who, together have a project concept linked with the subject of this presentation.
I'll say a bit about our hatchery results. We've grown yearling S1s for 30 years, and in early 1996, our smolts were assessed as part of the co-operative assessment salmonid health program for aquaculture, which attained 98% survivals to harvest. Our freshwater juvenile rearing program is transferable to the enhancement program. We predicted marine survivals would increase to 5% to 10% compared to DFO's hatchery ocean S0 marine survival, which is 0.02% to 0.06%.
DFO previously grew 16 trials with S1s, but did not have greater results. However, in 2009, Mr. Paul Sprout, who was the RDG, directed his staff to revisit the use of S1s and work with Omega Pacific, with the goal of increasing chinook survival rates.
To date, Omega Pacific has produced 478,000 S1 chinook for 10 releases, with four complete datasets. Seven years are required from the initial egg stage until all the adults return. All of our S1 juveniles released were coded wire tagged and adipose clipped. Omega's projects and support of the strategy were only possible due to the support and financial contribution of many groups, which I have listed in our brief.
The adipose fin clip and coded wire tag pin are numerical pins. The coded wire tag is placed into the fish's nose, and as the fish are captured in the wild as adults, the head of any fish missing the adipose fin is removed, and the pin later read. The number, which is specific to that release group of fish, is placed in a Pacific-wide data bank. Therefore, we can assess where all the fish we have grown are captured: their date, fishery, number of fish captured and overall survivals.
To date, for Omega's S1 releases for the West Coast Vancouver Island and Georgia Strait, our first four-year results had greater than 5% marine survivals, a two to eight-times greater number of adult spawners as compared to the same stream S0 releases. An eight to 31 times greater number of coded wire fish were recovered, compared to federal production S0 releases; few jacks—