Fraser River sockeye salmon: data synthesis and cumulative impacts

McKinnell: There are no marine survival indices – the fences are all up in the rivers so there isno starting point from which to generate abundance information. So monitoring needs toestimate post-smolt emigration from river by stock. We should expend some effort to try tofind dead sockeye smolts. Find a way to see how sockeye are dying. We can’t use recruitsper spawner or smolt survival – we need a census of population as they enter the sea. Ideally,you could sample them at a “fence” in Johnston Strait to say what is coming out of GeorgiaStrait.Q/A: The difficulty with POST is that it is labour-intensive. Alternatives include sonar.Martins: My concern is that parental spawning success and incubation is a low priority. This isimportant to management. I agree with Martin’s suggestion about lake studies. Alsopredation.Hinch: I agree with Johannes, McKinnell and English. We need direct assessment of survival inthe juvenile and post-juvenile stages. We can make statements with the adults because wemeasure those but we do very little with juveniles. It transcends several of these categories –we need a way to assess relative abundance as they’re migrating out. Whether we use POSTor another technology that’s not as expensive, we can link that with oceanography or coastalresearch.Marmorek: The first step is to find where and when the victim died.Kent: My comment is about the near-shore research for pathogens. I think it’s important, thoughothers don’t think pathogens are important. If you do it, you need to look at pre-smolt fish aspathogen research requires you to look at the host through different life stages.Porter: Methods to address broad changes in the quality of spawning habitat. Assessment acrossa CU’s spawning reaches and showing annual changes. There is no method in place to dothat. This includes water quality.Wieckowski: Looking at whether there are any inter-generational impacts from adults coming inreally stressed, if this could be more common in the future.MacDonald: A general comment is that I like a lot of it but that there is opportunity to sharpenup a lot of these recommendations to more specifically address what we’re looking at.Priorities include temperature effects and en route losses and interactive effects oftemperature and contaminants in en route losses.Groot: What is obvious is our lack of biological information on what they do in the open ocean.We are way behind the oceanographers. We now have lighthouses, Argus floats andmonitoring stations, so use the technology that we have (we use tags for birds, evenbutterflies, so use them for salmon too). With changing climate there will be morefluctuations, so we need to get out and observer instead of continually rehashing the old data.Peterman: We were discussing the same thing. Astronomers and oceanographers get big,expensive projects approved.Martin: We need a sockeye research collaborative – not just for BC but international – that looksat the flow through the whole life history – a big picture approach.70