Peamouth’s arrival in Bellevue streams from Lake Washington, are as much a sign of spring as Groundhog Day. Up to a foot in length, and sporting red and yellow streaks, their narrow bodies can be seen undulating through the warm water.
“When you get them mid-afternoon and the sun is out, it’s pretty impressive,” said Laurie Devereaux of the Bellevue’s stream team, who this week trained volunteers to track the minnow’s spawning patterns. “It’s a bunch of shiny fish, from one side of the stream to the other.”
Unlike salmon eggs, which incubate for several months, peamouth typically come through in 48 hours time, plastering the bottom of the stream with cream-colored eggs, which will hatch in seven to nine days.
The city began tracking peamouth in 2003 when a concerned resident, whose business sat atop Sturtevant Creek, said she’d spotted the fish struggling upstream. Devereaux followed her down to the site and assured her that the hardy fish, which prefer warm water and lower water levels, were in fact just reproducing. The following year, a volunteer called to say she’d again seen them coming over the fish ladder.
“It was the most I’d seen at any one time,” Devereaux recalled.
Because the city has only been tracking peamouth for 10 years, data is too limited to fully understand their migration patterns. Devereaux said, for instance, that she hadn’t realized the fish made several runs in one year. Until 2005, they’d only asked volunteers to check streams in April.
“That year I got a call from Kelsey Creek Farm. It was a beautiful Mother’s Day and suddenly the stream was full of fish,” she said. “Sure enough, it was peamouth.”
It’s unclear what causes them to spawn in the first place. Lake temperatures and stream flow levels could be a factor. Peamouth are often overshadowed by the salmon that distribute their eggs between the gravel of the same streams, but for Eastside ecosystems, they’re just as important.
“These survey efforts are improving upon current knowledge about when and where peamouth spawn,” reads a 2011 report by the City of Bellevue. “It is hoped that this information will help our understanding of what triggers peamouth spawning and what can be done to improve their spawning distribution.”
With the peamouth come blue heron, wood ducks, river otters and bald eagles. In 2011 improvements to one of two main peamouth watching sites, in Kelsey Creek near the Wilburton Trestle, made passage for the fish easier. Devereax encourages residents, even if they haven’t volunteered to collect data, to visit the sites.
“They’re not a keystone species like salmon, but they are a sign of spring,” she explains. “And they are life in our streams. They’re a really big part of our ecosystems.”
Volunteer training finished Tuesday, Apr. 23 but readers can still sign up for peamouth alerts here.
