Salmon Survey

Last week I took a trip with the fish biologist at the park Dave, to help him with a salmon survey on Copper Lake and Tanada Lake. We were delayed a day due to cloudy conditions, but eventually we were able to pack-up the float plane leave for Copper Lake. When we got to the lake Dave and I had our own cabins, so I put all of my things in the cabin. When I was about to head back out of the cabin I noticed this bucket with a little bit of water in it, and inside there was something dark. I looked at it a little closer and this is what I saw

that is a dead bat by the way. Um yeah… It must have fallen into the bucket and couldn’t get out. When I dumped it outside it had been in the water so long it just burst open when it hit the ground, it was pretty nasty.

At Copper Lake we collected flesh samples of salmon. Copper Lake is unique in that it has kokanee salmon, this is salmon that remains in the lake it was born into for its entire life. They don’t grow as large as the sockeye salmon that go out to the ocean for a few years. The park is interested to see how closely related the kokanee salmon are to the sockeye salmon in the lake, so it was up to us to collect DNA samples that could be compared. We just walked along the shore the first day and collected samples from fish that had washed up on shore. The next day we took a boat out to find fish that were floating on the lake. I had to scoop up the fish and put them in the boat.

Later in the day we were picked up by the float plane and taken to Tanada Lake which is not too far away from Copper. Luckily this time when I got into my cabin there wasn’t a dead bat, well at least one I found : )

At Tanada Lake we were still collecting dead salmon, but for this study we didn’t need good DNA we just needed the heads to be intake because we were collecting otolith bones from the fishes’ skulls. Otolith bones are two small bones that rest just underneath the brains, during the fish’s life the bones get larger forming distinct growth rings that can be used like growth rings on a tree. The whole point of collecting these bones it to see the relative age of the fish spawning in the lakes. Because these were just bones in the head, it really didn’t matter what the

rest of the fish looked like, or smelled like for that matter. I picked up some of the nastiest fish I have ever seen and then I just had to throw them in the boat. At points I was kneeling in a huge pile of rotting oozing fish. Luckily I had rubber gloves so my hands didn’t smell super nasty and Dave was the one to cut open the heads and get out the bones, I was tasked with opening and keeping track of the vials the bones were going to go into. Hey I wasn’t complaining, these fish were disgusting, I am glad it was windy because that would have been bad.

Snow has begun, ice was starting to form on
Tanada Lake : (

This was my last trip for the season, for the next 30 days I will be tasked with writing the end of year report and mounting collected plant specimens that are back logged from previous years. All in all it was a good last trip; I got to see a really clear night sky a couple of the nights, there were water fowl all over the place, and I saw my first caribou. Plus now I REALLY know I don’t want to be a fish biologist. : )

These salmon get some pretty nastly teeth when they are spawning

If you look closely you can see the age rings on each of the otolith bones