[6] Council OK's Funding For Ocean Tracking Study
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council has approved an expensive proposal to track juvenile salmon along the West Coast with acoustic tags and long lines of receivers stretched out along the Continental Shelf, despite the fact that the instruments won't be able to pick up signals from another kind of tag being used by other scientists to study estuary survivals at the same time.
The scientific review panel that judged the merit of the project had serious reservations about it, but OK'd reduced funding for the proposal, developed by Canadian researcher David Welch to track spring chinook up the coast. Consultant Welch, who is president of the Kintama Research Corporation, has developed an ambitious project for tracking salmon called POST [Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking Project] that is funded by several entities to track major fish runs in BC through a growing network of arrays on the continental shelf all the way to Alaska. BPA will pony up $1.5 million this year as its share.
The panel questioned whether all the Snake smolts really stay on the shelf as they move north, but they OK'd a year's funding to test the feasibility of using the arrays to track fish migration and estimate survival. The ISRP said Welch's responses to their comments reinforced their initial recommendation "and raised new concerns."
Budget constraints have reduced the number of arrays that will be placed south of the Columbia to just one, but two of them will be deployed north of the river, one off Willapa Bay and the other off Vancouver Island.
In a presentation before the Council last December, Welch presented some preliminary evidence that he said showed about 15 percent of the Snake River spring chinook survived to a point off the north end of Vancouver Island. Another controversial element of his presentation was the inclusion of some sparse data on estuary survival that estimated about 50 percent of the inriver Snake spring run made it from Bonneville Dam to the ocean. Critics say Welch is confusing detection rates with survival rates.
Corps of Engineers and NFMS scientists have begun their own survival studies in the estuary, using much smaller tags which are completely incompatible with Welch's POST instruments. The smaller tags operate on different frequencies and must be used in conjunction with receivers placed much closer together than those used by Welch. With evidence that the large tags affect swimming ability since they weigh about 10 percent as much as the juvenile fish, US scientists hope they will be able to use the smaller ones in fall chinook as well. No estimates for estuary survival were made from last year's initial research, but they expect to get enough data this spring to produce preliminary results by next winter.
The Corps decided not to fund another proposal submitted last fall by OSU researcher Carl Schreck, who planned on using the same acoustic tags as Welch's group.
The lack of collaboration was a point emphasized by the ISRP. Last December, the panel told Welch that his proposal would be improved if he described attempts to collaborate or coordinate with estuary researchers. Welch said he was keen to collaborate and had worked with a NMFS group in 2002 that had proposed a different acoustic tag technology, but later was told that NMFS "had dropped us" from the project. He also noted that his own group has had useful discussions with NMFS plume researcher Ed Casillas. -B. R.
The following links were mentioned in this story:
Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking Project
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