{ Salmon sleuths
International expedition hopes to discover what happens to five species after they leave rivers
An team of international scientists sailed from Vancouver Saturday on a five-week voyage to try to discover what happens to salmon after they leave rivers for the ocean.
Twenty-one scientists from Russia, Canada, the United States, Japan and South Korea have taken residence on the Russian research ship MV Professor Kaganovsky for an unprecedented international expedition.
The five-week voyage will probe the secret lives of five Pacific salmon species with a massive grid search and test fishery across the Gulf of Alaska.
Before setting out Saturday, researchers scrambled to get their equipment stowed in the cramped laboratory space and backups to everything stored and below decks just in case.
What they hope to gain is an understanding of salmon health, behaviour and abundance that could revolutionize fisheries forecasting.
“We know virtually nothing about what happens to salmon once they leave nearshore waters in the Salish Sea,” said expedition organizer Dick Beamish.
The North Pacific is a proverbial black box that salmon swim into as juveniles and return from as adults, often ready to return to their home rivers and streams to spawn, he said.
The project was developed as a research element of the 2019 International Year of the Salmon celebration, organized by the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission and its partners.
“This won’t be the most luxurious voyage, it’s a standard Russian research ship, so we are having to resolve some issues before we go,” said Beamish, who raised more than $1 million to charter and outfit the vessel.
Plenty of electrical converters were on hand to cope with the Russian electrical systems.
A satellite communications system the Canadian contingent had hoped to install before setting to sea had to be abandoned as unsuitable.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) researcher Chrys Neville was working hard to find last-minute replacements for the comms gear.
Once at sea, the Kaganovsky will use a trawl net with a 40-metre-wide opening to scoop up salmon for an hour at a time at about 50 locations between Haida Gwaii and the Aleutian Islands.
Scientists will record the size, condition and fat content of each fish and use DNA testing to identify — down to the stream bed — which stock they come from.
“We will, for the first time ever, have stock-specific abundances of all the species and all the stocks that rear in the Gulf of Alaska after their first ocean winter,” said Beamish.
The project will also provide stock-specific comparisons with juvenile salmon during their early rearing period in B.C.’s “salmon nursery” in the Salish Sea, said Neville.
Researchers will be taking careful water temperature readings to get a better handle on the warming trends observed in the area.
“How are fish going to respond to (warming waters) and what will it mean for their condition?” asked Neville. “It’s important for us to get this information, because we are going to continue to see (temperatures) outside the norm, I would expect.”
Beamish sought $250,000 from the DFO, which gave the project considerable legitimacy right out of the gate.
Other major donors include the provincial government, the Pacific Salmon Foundation, the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association, Harmac and the Pacific Salmon Commission.
The expedition will help close a long-standing knowledge gap in the study of salmon, said Brian Riddell, CEO of the Pacific Salmon Foundation.
“We’ve been studying salmon in fresh water, nearshore waters and estuaries for 100 years, but we’ve done very little in the ocean,” he said. “The Russians have done abundance studies for years in their waters, but we’ve never done it here.”
The so-called “blob” and its effect on sockeye populations changed the way scientists think about the ocean-going lives of salmon.
“We had fish returning so small they swam right through the nets,” said Riddell. “They were that small. If ocean conditions have that kind of impact on the size, health and abundance of these fish it certainly means we have a lot more work to do on climate change.”
Knowing more about how stocks mix and the productivity of those waters could also inform changes to hatchery production and ocean ranching.
Follow the MV Professor Kaganovsky’s expedition in regular reports in The Province as it works its way around the Gulf of Alaska over the next month.
Wehadfish returning so small they swam right through nets. They were that small.” Brian Riddell