The Yamanashi Prefectural Government plans to raise an endangered deepwater salmon species discovered in 2010 in Lake Saiko at the foot of Mount Fuji — 70 years after it died out in its original habitat 500 km northeast in Akita Prefecture's Lake Tazawa.
Yamanashi Prefectural Fisheries Technology Center culturists will gill-net the "kunimasu" species in the 2.1-sq.-km lake, collecting sperm from males and eggs from females for fertilization at a hatchery in February and March — peak mating season — said Kiyoshi Mitsui, the center's director.
The kunimasu was classified as a new species in the genus of Pacific salmon in 1925 by David Starr Jordan, a U.S. ichthyologist and the first president of Stanford University, and Ernest McGregor, another ichthyologist, in the authoritative Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum.