Mark Taylor, The Salmon Savior
Snoqualmie, Wash. Tropical fish importer

To help a rare subspecies of salmon, Mark Taylor whipped a TU chapter into a frenzy, got Boy Scouts and high school students involved in fish-count and habitat improvement projects, then came up with an Adopt-a-Kokanee program that has helped fund the research.

Mark Taylor, born and raised in Washington, loves the Pacific Northwest. When he saw a fragment of its wildness slipping away, he had to do something.

He was integral in restarting the -Bellevue-​-Issaquah Chapter of Trout Unlimited back in 2004. "We soon realized that the Lake Sammamish kokanee salmon were in dire straits, with fewer spawning fish returning each year," he says. "We needed to figure out what was happening."

Much of the problem was obvious: shoreline development. Eight miles east of Seattle, the 7-mile-long lake is in the middle of a rapidly growing suburb. "It's a fully utilized lake," says Taylor, 45.

With help from the Eagle Scouts, Taylor started trapping fry on Lewis Creek, a major spawning tributary, in an attempt to count the number of Sammamish-strain kokanees.

"Over the years, between 20 million and 40 million kokanees from outer sources were put in the lake to bolster the population. Today there is no genetic trace of any of those fish. The only strain able to survive in this lake is the Sammamish strain.

"We're trying to determine what the fish do in the lake, how they interact with each other. Hopefully, we'll be able to identify spawning sites," says Taylor.

When volunteers catch a mature kokanee or cutthroat, they take it to shore and implant a tiny transmitter in its belly.

"The Adopt-a-Fish program is one way to fund the studies. If you adopt a kokanee, we ask you for $100, which helps pay for the transmitter. Then we send you an adoption certificate and a picture of ‘your' fish. This gets people involved."

The goal is to return the kokanees to a self--sustaining population. "Although at this point, I'd just be happy if I didn't have to worry about them dying out, because they are such a rare subspecies."