Project will study migration routes of Atlantic salmon
Oil and gas money will help improve knowledge on Atlantic salmon migration
Salmon scientist Martha Robertson is headed to the Northern Peninsula this week to find some young salmon and fit them with acoustic tags.
It’s some of the work involved in a five-year project to track salmon as they move out of coastal rivers in Atlantic Canada to the open ocean.
Robertson, who has been working in the salmonid division of Fisheries and Oceans Canada since 1998, is the lead salmon scientist for this province.
Not a lot is known about the migration routes of Atlantic salmon from coastal areas through areas of offshore oil activity.
So the oil and gas industry, through the Environmental Studies Research Fund (ESRF) administered by Natural Resources Canada, is spending a few million dollars to enable scientists to gather more data on offshore salmon migration.
The $11.8 million will allow scientists with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to track Atlantic salmon for five years.
It’s the largest-ever telemetry project in Eastern Canada, said Robertson.
About 50 collaborators are involved, she added. The three main members of the project steering committee are: The Ocean Tracking Network (OTN) at Dalhousie University in Halifax, which will get $2.4 million of the funding to provide the acoustic telemetry work; the Atlantic Salmon Federation (ASF), which gets $2.5 million for fieldwork involving satellite telemetry; and the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources (UNIR) of Cape Breton is getting $1.1 million to support the incorporation of essential Indigenous knowledge.
To track the salmon they’ll use acoustic technology, fitting the young salmon with small acoustic transmitters, enabling Robertson to track them for about 90 days, from the time they leave the estuary.
The plan is to tag about 1,000 smolts from rivers in all of Eastern Canada.
About 300 large salmon will be fixed with the satellite tags.
Robertson said aboriginal groups, anglers and others with knowledge of salmon rivers and salmon, will help with fish capture and tagging.
“Hopefully, after three months the smolt will be further up towards the Labrador Sea or in offshore areas.”
Larger salmon will be fixed with satellite tags, which can last up to three years, enabling scientists to track the fish around the North Atlantic.
Robertson said there’s already significant data on near-shore migration of salmon in estuaries around the Exploits and Bay d’espoir area and in Labrador, for instance, thanks to small-scale telemetry studies.
That research was focused on smolt survival in nearshore areas.
The funding supplied by oil and gas will allow scientists to tag salmon for the next three years.
Robertson said the information gathered about salmon migration will be combined with oceanographic data like water temperatures and currents, to determine the factors that drive the migration pattern of salmon.
“Then we might be able to make predictions into the future. So we know that the climate is changing and we can predict how that climate change will affect ocean temperature and current and … hopefully we’ll have enough data to predict how the migration patterns of salmon will change in the future,” said Robertson.
Knowing the migration route of salmon through the offshore should also allow researchers to understand what kinds of predators and salmon are meeting along the way.
“I don’t study the impact of seal predation or bycatch from other fisheries,” she said, “but this project … will be able to show us other factors that might be impacting salmon survival.
“Once we know when and where they (salmon) are going to be in certain areas, we can look at the predators that are in that area. And we can also look at the abundance of prey for salmon as well. So it will help us understand the marine survival of Atlantic salmon in general.”
While the study is not focused on the impact of oil and gas exploration on salmon migration, Robertson said, the research should determine whether migrating salmon overlap in space and time with oil activity.
That information, she said, could helpful for the oil industry in deciding whether to take steps to mitigate their impact during the annual salmon run.