Pacific salmon stock assessment
Stock assessment is an important part of the conservation and management of Pacific salmon. It helps us understand the salmon life-cycle and answers questions like how many salmon are there, how old they are, how many young they have, and how fast they grow. This research helps us make informed, evidence-based fisheries management decisions.
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Transcript
In this video, Fisheries and Oceans Canada explains the basics of Salmon Stock Assessment or in other words, how we count salmon.
There are five species of Pacific salmon organized into more than 9,600 stocks. Each stock shares the same location and timing for spawning.
Salmon are born in rivers and streams, migrate out to the ocean to feed and grow, and then return to their streams to spawn and die.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s highest priority for managing salmon is preserving them as a resource for future generations.
So how do we do that? By using stock assessment science to give fisheries managers the advice they need to make sound decisions about the conservation and management of salmon.
What is Salmon Stock Assessment? It is the science of understanding fish populations. It aims to answer biology questions like...
- How many salmon are there?
- How old are they?
- How many are male or female?
- How quickly do they grow?
- How many young do they have?
It also looks at what fish eat, where fish live and what habitats are important to their long-term survival and how the environment can influence or change fish populations.
So where does all this information come from?
Catch and effort sampling programs tell us how many salmon are caught where, and how hard fishers had to work to catch them. This way we know what percentage are fished and how many survive to spawn future generations.
Mark-recapture programs help us understand where and when juvenile salmon travel during their migration and what percentage survive to be caught as adults and also what proportion of returning adults successfully spawn.
The best way to find out how many fish have survived to spawn is to count them. Dead-pitching, fish fences, swim surveys, and aerial surveys are all ways of estimating the abundance of returning stocks.
For more information on salmon stock assessment, please visit our website.
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