STRAWBERRY RESERVOIR — With each tug on the net, one chub after another appeared. When all were counted, there were far more chubs in that first net than had been expected. It was not a good sign.

But when the next gill net came up, there were far fewer. On the last net pulled, there were only a few.

"Initially, things looked pretty bad," said Roger Wilson, project leader for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources as he reviewed results of a spring gill-net survey.

"There were lots of chubs in that first net. On a whole, though, things look pretty good. That net turned out to be the exception."

And even though there were many more chubs in that one net, Wilson said that after reviewing the report sheets, "We found they were mostly adults or the older chubs. There weren't many 1- and 2-year-old fish. When chubs get to be adults, there's not much you can do. The fact we saw fewer of the smaller fish is encouraging."

In the end, only three of the 12 nets pulled held an abundance of chubs.

Each spring and fall, biologists conduct gill-net surveys to check on the progress of a new management strategy.

The villain here is the Utah chub. It's a nuisance fish. A trash fish to some. They have very poor dining qualities and are an annoyance more than they are appealing to catch, but they are hardy. They can out-compete more preferred catches, such as rainbow trout. Which, of course, is why all the fish in the reservoir were killed in 1991 and why new management strategies were implemented in 2002.

Prior to the '91 treatment, chubs made up 95 percent of the fish population. After treatment, Bear Lake cutthroat were planted in hopes they would eat chubs. Also planted were sterile rainbow and kokanee salmon. Sterile rainbow were planted so their more passive nature wouldn't dilute the cutthroat line.

Progress was slow, so three years ago new strategies were introduced. Now, all cutthroat trout between 15 and 22 inches are classified as illegal catches and must be immediately released.

The theory being that the bigger cutthroats, a voracious predator, would dine more frequently on the chubs.

"And we're seeing that," Wilson said. "The vast majority of the chubs we saw were older . . . larger than what most cutthroat can eat. The younger, smaller chubs are the ones we want to target, and we saw far fewer smaller chubs. There was a dramatic drop in minnows, (redside) shiner and chubs, which means the cutthroat are doing their job."

Another sign that the project is working is the cutthroat checked were fat, healthy and, in some cases, full of chubs.

"What this tells us is that the predation rate has exceeded what it was last fall, which is what we want to see," Wilson said.