Saving Seafood

Salmon studies: North Pacific project trawls for data, funding

May 24, 2019 — “I like to say to people that after 100 years of research, we know a lot about salmon. But what we need to know most, we mostly don’t know,” said fisheries scientist Richard Beamish following the first International Year of the Salmon expedition this year. “We can’t forecast how a changing ocean ecosystem is going to affect salmon.”

Beamish, who organized the expedition and is an emeritus scientist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, British Columbia, is seeking $1.5 million from governments, the private sector and nonprofit organizations for a 2020 expansion. The program’s researchers would like to carry the program into 2021 to continue their work on North Pacific salmon stocks and climate change.

The 2019 expedition, which was a signature project of the program, kicked off in February with an international winter salmon study in the deepest regions of the Gulf of Alaska. The 2020 expedition would put two Russian trawlers on the water to expand the work of a pilot 25-day single-vessel survey that ran early this year in the Gulf of Alaska.

A bigger survey is in the works for 2021. It would involve five ships surveying the entire North Pacific Ocean. The cost of that project is estimated at $10 million.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Expedition planned to better understand Gulf of Alaska salmon stocks

November 27, 2018 — Richard Beamish, a scientist recently retired from Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, is planning an expedition across the Gulf of Alaska to better understand changes in salmon stocks.

Beamish, who is being financially supported by fish farm operators, said that scientists do not fully comprehend the rising and falling of wild salmon stocks. Beamish said the contract for the expedition had not yet been signed but that funding for his proposal had been recently secured. Beamish declined to specifically name which salmon farmers were backing the project.

“We still don’t know the mechanisms that allow us to accurately forecast salmon,” Beamish said during an aquaculture industry conference in Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada.

Beamish proposes a group of scientist trawl for salmon in the Gulf of Alaska and take and use DNA samples to determine the salmon’s origin, allowing them to estimate their abundance in the region.

“No one has ever done this in the Gulf of Alaska, where the bulk of our salmon are in the winter,” he said.

Because the study would involve a huge area of ocean which is vital to British Columbia salmon stocks, the project has the support of the Canadian government as well as other governments. Beamish indicated that a teams of scientists from nations including South Korea, Japan, Russia, The United States, and Canada would be involved. A Russian vessel would be used for the survey, at a cost of USD 900,000, (EUR 785,719) he said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source