For the last 7 years I have been working for Fisheries and Oceans Canada down on the Taku River. This is a joint Canadian/American camp that is located 2 miles from the Canada/US border on the Taku River. Some species of fish that can be found in the river are Chinook, Sockeye, Coho, Pink and Chum salmon, Steelhead, Dolly Varden, Cutthroat and Bull trout. For a generic life cycle of the Salmon species click here.

We go into the field mid April and the first project is Smolt tagging. Gee traps (or minnow traps)are setup up and down the river to catch Chinook and Coho smolt that are migrating out to the Pacific Ocean. These fish then have a coded wire tag (CWT) inserted into their nose and released. This tag has a code that will be able to tell biologists when and where the fish was tagged. This will help in tracking the fish and making population estimates.

Around the same time another camp has setup a fishwheel and gillnets for catching chinook that are migrating home to spawn. Because the water is to low at the beginning of the season for the wheels to spin properly, these fish are caught in a gillnet. An under-sized mesh is used to minimize the stress on the fish during capture. A scale sample is taken, they are then measured, sexed, have a numerical and uniquely colored (by specie)Floy Tag applied to them and then released. When the water gets high enough for the wheels to spin properly they are used to catch the fish and the net is no longer used. The fishwheel is a good capture method as it runs 24 hours a day and stress on the fish is minimal. The fishwheels run until mid September or when the water gets to low to spin them properly. The nets are then used until the end of the season in mid October.

The Floy tags applied to the salmon are used to help in assessing run timing of the different species. If you take how many tags were applied at the fishwheels and how many were recovered in the fishery above the border you can go into the wonderful world of Statistics and make an estimate on how strong the run is currently. You can also estimate travel times by finding out when the tags were applied and when they were recovered on the spawning grounds.

Scale samples are used to get an age of the fish. You read a scale by counting the rings present on the scale.Thin darker rings represent winter because the cold inhibits the growth of the fish and the wider lighter rings represents summer because the warmer water causes the fish to grow quicker. The ages can then be used to make an estimate of the run size the following year. Since most fish return by a certain age year you can look at the percentage of an age class that returned this year and make an assumption of the percentage of that age class returning next year. So if historically 70% of the fish are age 4 and 30% are age 5 and you have a high return of age 5 fish in the current year,then you can assume that the following year their will be a high return of age 4 fish.

Otoliths are also collected to help assess the age of the fish. Otoliths are bone structures found in the head of fish. they are more accurate than scales because they cannot be resorbed but the fish has to be killed to collect them. You read an otolith the same way as a scale. You can also get information like marine conditions and if the otoliths have thermal marks put on them at a hatchery you can tell what hatchery they came from and what year they were released.

This year (2004) I am working on The Stikine River Drainage doing telemetry studies on Tuya River Sockeye. This has been totally different than anything that I have done on the Taku River. Radio tags have been applied to sockeye on the Tuya River and we have been tracking them to see where, if anywhere, they have been going to.

Last Year (2003) I worked at Dalton Post on a fish weir on the Klukshu River. This weir was in place to help determine run strength of the chinook, sockeye and, to a degree, coho salmon on the Klukshu River. A weir is an obstruction across the creek that fish cannot get by except at a designated area where someone will count and sample the fish as they go by. length , sex and scale samples are taken from these fish as well.