Mark Taylor wants to eat Lake Sammamish kokanee.

He knows, he knows: Fishing the sockeye’s freshwater cousin out of the lake has been banned since the late 1980s, after kokanee runs to Issaquah Creek collapsed.

But hey, if he’s legally eating them, it means the Lake Sammamish kokanee population — genetically distinct from any other — bounced back from near extinction.

Taylor is the former Bellevue/Issaquah chapter president of Trout Unlimited, a national organization dedicated to preserving cold-water fisheries, and their watersheds, in North America. The Bellevue/Issaquah chapter is dedicated to the Lake Sammamish kokanee, which live in the Lake Washington watershed.

Right now, local Trout Unlimited volunteers are in Sammamish and Issaquah creeks counting wild kokanee fry — baby fish that are, as Taylor puts it, a “pine needle with an eyeball.”

Jim Bower, a fish ecologist with King County, says Trout Unlimited’s work monitoring egg-to-fish survival rates is the “most critical catch.”

“This data is so valuable because it’ll tell us what that rate of return is,” Bower told Trout Unlimited members during a March chapter meeting. “Changing that number just a tiny bit is really changing mortality rates.”

This is the 10th year Trout Unlimited volunteers have collected kokanee fry data, which they pass on to King County for analysis.

There’s not a lot of historical data on the kokanee, nothing like what Trout Unlimited volunteers are creating. And while current data helps pinpoint kokanee populations, which indicate the species is overall on a slow recovery, it tends to create more questions than answers, as incomplete data usually does.

For example, this year’s return, from October to February, was the third-highest in the last two decades. Officials recorded more than 5,000 fish returning.

“We thought we’d get at least 15,000 fish back,” Bower said.

Kokanee salmon, most recognizable for their red bodies, return to their native streams as adults, three to four years after entering the lake, to mate before dying. Meaning, 2015-2016 returning kokanee were the offspring of an estimated 15,000 spawners in 2012-2013.

So why did only a fraction of those return? The truth is, they don’t really know.

Either way, counts Trout Unlimited volunteers record throughout the spring help the county measure return rates and combine that data with other factors, such as weather events, which will help determine what’s going on.

From March through June, three times a week, volunteers take shifts trapping and counting fry from dusk until roughly midnight — though, one sit-in at a Trout Unlimited chapter meeting at the Issaquah Brewhouse and it’s clear this group is happy to hang alongside a creek on a cool, clear night.

They’ll do it when it’s raining, too, volunteer stream manager Mark Getzendaner said, but he definitely prefers dry weather.

Getzendaner, of Bellevue, is an environmental chemist.

He’s known Taylor, the guy who wants to eat kokanee, for many years. They met back when they both had businesses dealing with tropical fish.

“I love the kokanee,” said Taylor, who is on Trout Unlimited’s board of trustees. “I’ve been eating them all my life.”

He’s referring to the other kokanee populations, such as those in Lake Chelan. You can eat those — their lakes are stocked, ripe for “angling opportunity,” as the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife puts it.

Genetic analysis says there’s no kokanee like a Lake Sammamish kokanee, though, and that makes them worth protecting.

“I got excited about the kokanee because they’re a survivor fish,” Getzendaner said during his recent shift in late March at Lewis Creek in Issaquah.

It’s normally too early and too cold to see fry in March, but since this year’s return was so large, kokanee officials expected to see fry wading down creek sooner. And, indeed, Getzendaner caught a couple. Other volunteers reported handfuls of fry in their streams, too. Fry counts really start to pick up in April, he said.

Lewis Creek, which headwaters are in Bellevue, is one of three streams Lake Sammamish kokanee spawn in today. The other two, Ebright and Laughing Jacob creeks, are in Sammamish.

Trout Unlimited is still looking for volunteers to help record data. For more information or to volunteer, call Getzendaner at 206-419-7321.

Trout Unlimited and King County are part of the Lake Sammamish Kokanee Workgroup, which has been working to understand and save the kokanee population since it formed in 2007.

“I don’t know if we can save them or not, but I know what will happen if we don’t try,” Taylor said.