Published Oct 10, 2023 by https://www.kyuk.org/people/evan-erickson Sabrina Garcia is a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in the middle of a five-year tagging and modeling project as part of her PhD studies at the industry-funded University of Alaska Fairbanks Pollock Conservation Cooperative Research Center. Garcia hopes that the project will generate predictive maps for chinook bycatch that could sharpen the way the Alaska pollock fishery is regulated. To do that, the computer models have to be tested against real data.
“There is a chance that we try to create these models and we don't find that winning combination of variables that accurately predict chinook salmon presence,” Garcia said. “These models are being used in other fisheries and they work for things like turtles and whales. Can we apply that to chinook salmon?”
Currently, pollock trawlers operate under rolling hotspot closures that change based on real-time chinook bycatch data that vessels provide to a private monitoring group called Sea State. While the system has helped reduce chinook bycatch, Garcia said that it lacks the fine-scale data about the depth where the salmon were caught that could help researchers understand their ocean habitat. She hopes the predictive maps her team is working to develop can offer trawl captains another tool to avoid bycatch.
But to create the necessary models, the researchers need reliable data from what are known as pop-up satellite archival tags, or PSATs. At $4,000 a piece, these are small devices programmed to detach from mature chinook salmon after nine months at sea, float to the surface, and transmit a whole lot of information about what those fish have done. Garcia hopes that this data will yield brand new insights about chinook migration patterns, especially stocks from Western Alaska.
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