‘SalmonAtion’ event on Lopez
Published 9:43 am Tuesday, December 31, 2013
New insights about the islands’ marine food webs and “forage fish” will be shared at Kwiáht’s fifth annual SalmonAtion celebration, Jan. 18 at Lopez Center, beginning at 5:30 p.m. Admission is free.
In addition to the traditional offering of savory snacks from Vita’s and a selection of wines from Lopez Island Vineyards, this year’s event will include Chicken Biscuit’s premiere of a salmon song by Gretchen Wing, and an installation of seashore paintings by the SalmonAtion 2014 poster artist, Mike Rust.
Once again, Kwiáht’s dedicated local volunteers were able to measure and lavage more than 500 juvenile Chinook without government funding and with a survival rate of over 99 percent. This year, special attention was devoted to identifying parasites, such as copepod “sea lice”, isopods that attach to gills, and roundworms that hide under skin, in blood, and inside stomachs. “This will help us better understand how parasites affect the appetite and growth of wild salmon at sea,” says Kwiáht director Russel Barsh.
Salmon were also screened for respiratory distress, a sign of ichthyophoniasis, an emerging fungal disease of fish, and for the bleeding associated with viral hemorrhagic septicemia (VHS), which is a growing concern in herring and may be passed to salmon.
Special attention was also paid to Pacific Sandlance, the skinny silvery gold fish that appear to make up over 80 percent of the diet of juvenile salmon and diving seabirds in our waters. Relatively little is known about their population dynamics or ecology, and Kwiáht has taken the lead in studying their genetic diversity in the Salish Sea with DNA from sandlance seined in the islands or recovered from salmon stomachs, and specimens donated by scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Nisqually Tribe, and other agencies.
“Sandlance in the North Atlantic and western Pacific turned out to be two or more species that look alike but reproduce at different times of year in very different habitats,” Barsh says. “We think that only a small proportion of the sandlance we see in the islands come from spawning on beaches.” Kwiáht will begin using a specially designed trawl to look for larval sandlance in deep waters between January and April.
“It is difficult to escape the conclusion,” he says, “that we have not yet identified, much less protected the habitat that produces most of the forage fish used by salmon and seabirds.” San Juan County regulations and salmon-recovery funding currently focus on beaches where smelt and at least some sandlance spawn.
When Lopez-based conservation laboratory Kwiáht and local volunteers began seining salmon in the islands in 2008, scientists did not know that juvenile Chinook and Coho salmon depend on the San Juan Islands for prey on their way to the sea. Kwiáht has used data from thousands of salmon caught at Watmough Bight to develop a model of how fishy visitors adapt to changes in the variety and abundance of local prey, and how they may respond to climate change, shoreline modifications or oil spills in the future.
The Watmough Bight ecosystem is now part of the new San Juan Islands National Monument and its second most popular summer destination, highlighting the importance of understanding and protecting its ecosystem.
To learn more, Kwiáht invites you to meet scientists and volunteers at this year’s SalmonAtion event on January 18. Visit www.kwiaht.org or write to kwiaht@gmail.com for further information.
