Coastal Environmental Baseline Program – Port of Vancouver (Tsawwassen)
Learn about how Tsawwassen First Nation tracks eulachon migration in the Port of Vancouver.
The Coastal Environmental Baseline Program (CEBP) was established in 2017 as one of the initiatives under the Protecting the Marine Environment pillar of the Government of Canada’s Oceans Protection Plan. This Program contributes to coastal and waterway protection by providing funding for scientific activities that help us learn more about Canada’s coastal ecosystems.
Transcript
Paul Covert: The Coastal Environmental Baseline Program is an initiative by Fisheries and Oceans Canada to characterize the current state of the ecosystem and major shipping ports across Canada, where we have high or increasing vessel traffic. The program provides funding both to fisheries and Oceans Canada scientists and to community groups such as First Nations and ENGOs to collect that baseline data in areas of interest to all of those individual groups.
Krystal Lockert: The project itself came to be in early 2019 in the hopes that we could develop a program that would empower our membership to do more sort of nation focused work in terms of environmental stewardship, in terms of a species that is very culturally relevant. And in this circumstance, which is eulachon.
Ruby Baird: My name is Ruby Baird and I am a member of Tsawwassen First Nation. I am also a harvester in the community. I started fishing when I was 14, and by the time I was 17 I was operating my own vessel. I instantly fell in love with the water. I fell in love with fishing and all the hard work that comes with it.
I get a lot of cool reactions from people about what I do being a woman and fishing. I'm out here like seven days a week. I absolutely love it and I can't see myself doing anything else.
Krystal Lockert: The project itself involved two main components. The first being a migratory component, meaning we were tracking the actual migrations of eulachon up the river. And then a second component was the habitat preference for spawning, understanding eulachon spawning ground preferences is going to be crucial for protecting the species moving forward.
Ruby Baird: I'm also a field technician doing fish studies.
Chris Burns: It's great working with Ruby on the boat. Myself as a biologist can learn a lot from Ruby in terms of where the fish are. Why are they in a particular area?
Ruby Baird: Today with Chris, we were gill netting for Eulachon. We take the boat out to a spot that looks fishy. I don't have a sounder or anything to find the fish. I just kind of do it intuitively and we'll just set the net out across the river and we will set for about five to 15 minutes and then we pull it in and I gently cut the fish out of the net to make sure that they're alive and healthy, and then I just drop them in a bucket and I hand them to Chris.
Chris Burns: Before putting the tags in the fish we’re recording lengths and weights and get an idea of sex as well. And then we implant that tag into the fish. Throughout the Fraser River, the lower Fraser River, we have a number of acoustic receivers they’re called, and in each one of those receivers it's listening for the sound of the tag.
And as that fish moves up the river, that receiver then records that information. So we are able to know exactly what fish when that fish was tagged. The sex of that fish, the length of it when it was tagged, and that at what point it's making its movements up river.
Ruby Baird: We've lived off fish for many years. It takes up most of our diet. I mean, I can eat fish for breakfast, lunch and dinner, no problem. And the fact that the numbers are so low is scary. And it worries me and I think it worries a lot of our people.
Krystal Lockert: As indigenous people. We talk about seven generations down the line and fostering that understanding and that importance. And it doesn't just mean harvesting, it means taking active care of these resources to protect them for future generations.
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