By Laura Zuckerman
SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - Idaho fisheries managers will not follow the lead of neighboring states in restricting catch-and-release angling, despite a drought and heat wave that have killed or stressed large numbers of trout and other fish.
Idaho Fish and Game biologists said the unseasonably hot weather in the state in late June and early July had warmed and lowered the rivers weeks earlier than usual.
But they added this week that those conditions were not expected to continue to the point where trout, which are often caught and then released, would perish from the added stress of human handling.
Similar conditions in Oregon, Montana and Washington state prompted fisheries managers there to place limitations on fishing.
Fisheries managers and anglers across the Pacific Northwest have reported sightings of struggling and dead fish in streams in numbers that Mark Ahrens, acting chief of fisheries operations for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Pacific region, described as alarming.
"It's a depressing thing to be looking at," he said.
In Oregon, the Fish and Wildlife Service scrambled to save adult and juvenile salmon from a federal hatchery where water temperatures for the first time reached highs considered lethal to the coldwater fish.
The federal agency earlier this month trucked 160,000 juvenile and 680 adult spring Chinook salmon to a hatchery in the Columbia River Gorge in Washington from a hatchery in central Oregon where daytime river temperatures reached 76 degrees, Ahrens said.
The restrictions come at the height of the summer fishing season in the U.S. West, according to state and federal fisheries managers.
Factors feeding the stresses on game fish such as cutthroat trout include reduced precipitation and severely reduced mountain snowpack that usually melts gradually into streams, cooling them and fostering flows, government fish biologists said.
(Reporting by Laura Zuckerman in Salmon, Idaho; Editing by Eric M. Johnson and Peter Cooney)
