This fall, I volunteered to help with the Chum salmon survey being done by the North Olympic Salmon Coalition (NOSC) on Chimacum Creek, here on the NE corner of the Olympic Peninsula.
Unrequited Chum Salmon Female
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Starting in September and continuing through the end of October, volunteers have been walking 3 sections of Chimacum Creek, counting live and dead Chum salmon. Teams of 4 volunteers for each of the three sections have gone out once a week to walk the stretches of the creek where chum spawn. We gather in the morning at the NOSC offices to find chest waders and boots that fit. We pick up the necessary survey equipment and then arrange transportation for the access points at both ends of our assigned stretch. We walk upstream through the creek in areas where the fish do not lay their eggs (deep pools, muddy bottoms) and detouring around gravelly areas where the fish dig their nests called redds. We count the numbers of live and dead salmon and take samples from carcasses, including scales which can be used to determine age and tissue samples punched (with a regular office hole puncher) from the gill area for DNA analysis.
I had the opportunity to go out twice in the middle section of the creek, above a beaver dam and below a culvert under a highway. The first walk in early September yielded one live but lonely Chum. My later walk in mid-October yielded 181 live and 223 dead salmon. We gathered several relatively fresh carcasses to collect samples, including cutting dead females open to see if they had laid their eggs before they died or not (like the unfortunate one pictured above). While each section is not long, walking upstream in the creek and counting live salmon as we pass them, can be strenuous as we climb over trees that have fallen across the creek. For the carcasses we collect to sample, we record the species (mostly Chum in the fall), gender, length in centimeters, and whether it was wild or hatchery-bred (the adipose fin is removed in fish from a hatchery). After recording the data, we cut off the tail to signify to future surveyors that this carcass has already been recorded. I was fascinated to see salmon-shaped masses of maggots along the bank recycling some of the not-so-fresh carcasses.
Here are the data from so far this year and previous years.
I Love Contributing to Data!
The next survey project for NOSC is to count Coho salmon which are just starting their migration up the creek and who spawn farther upstream from the Chum.
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