Data Summary

The Hakai Institute Juvenile Salmon Program monitors the outmigration of British Columbia's juvenile Sockeye, Pink, and Chum salmon stocks during their northward migration from the Strait of Georgia through the Discovery Islands and Johnstone Strait. Here we report on key aspects of this migration period.
Fig. 1. This heatmap indicates the number of standard deviations (Z-score) from the time-series average (2015-2019) for key migration parameters. Blue colour indicates less than average, grey indicates average, and red indicates greater than average. Peak migration date is based on the median date of fish capture in the Discovery Islands. Catch intensity is the number of each species caught in a seine when catch of that species was > 0 in that seine. Length is based on the average fork length from the juvenile salmon in the Discovery Islands and Johnstone Strait. Parasite load is the average abundance of all sea lice species in their motile life stage for both the Discovery Islands and Johnstone Strait regions combined. Ocean temperature is 30 m depth-integrated temperature from station QU39 in the Northern Strait of Georgia from May and June.
Developer: Brett Johnson

Background

The Hakai Institute Juvenile Salmon Program was launched in the spring of 2015 in a collaborative partnership between the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Salmon Coast Field Station, Pacific Salmon Foundation, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada. The program operates in the Discovery Islands and Johnstone Strait regions of northern Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Juvenile salmon are captured using a purse seine net (bunt: 27 m × 9 m with 13 mm mesh; tow: 46 m × 9 m with 76 mm mesh) deployed from small motor-vessels allowing us to provide information on the health of juvenile salmon after passage through:

1) Strait of Georgia – stratified high plankton biomass zone; and

2) Discovery Islands & Johnstone Strait – highly-mixed low-plankton-biomass zone, and area of high wild-farmed fish interactions.

Study Area

Program Objectives

1) Evaluate the controls of prey phenology, quantity and quality for migrating juvenile salmon in the northern Strait of Georgia, Discovery Islands and Johnstone Strait;

2) Determine the stock-specific migration behaviour of juvenile sockeye salmon, and co-migrating salmon species, through the Discovery Islands and Johnstone Strait;

3) Determine juvenile salmon feeding biology and measure growth and condition across a spatial-temporal gradient of prey quantity and quality;

4) Determine juvenile salmon parasite and pathogen infection dynamics across the Discovery Islands / Johnstone Strait region.

5) Estimate the mortality rates of juvenile salmon during their Strait of Georgia to Queen Charlotte Strait migration.

Contact Us

We are endeavouring to provide useful information to the salmon research community, to that end please feel free to contact us with questions, comments, data requests, feautre requests, or possible collaborations. Please direct communications to Brian Hunt (b.hunt@oceans.ubc.ca) and Brett Johnson (brett.johnson@hakai.org).

Developer: Brett Johnson
Fig. 2. Cumulative catch of the juvenile sockeye, pink, and chum salmon migrating through the Discovery Islands. Migration curves were predicted by fitting a logistic growth equation to the cumulative catch proportion.
Fig. 3. The species-specific annual proportions of fishes captured in the Discovery Islands and Johnstone Strait combined.
Fig. 4. Fork length frequency distributions of juvenile salmon caught in the Discovery Islands and Johnstone Strait. Note that these distributions contain multiple age-classes.
Fig. 5. The abundance, prevalence, or intensity (Margolis et al. 1982) of sea lice parasites (+/- 95% CI)
Thirty meter depth-integrated average temperature deviances. Blue areas represent temperatures that are below study period averages, red areas represent above study-period average-temperatures at the selected station in 2018. Study-period average-temperature is the solid black line which is a loess regression based on temperatures from 2015-2018.

Supporting Documents

In chronological order:

2020

      Frommel, A. Y., J. Carless, B.P.V. Hunt, and C.J. Brauner. 2020. Physiological resilince of pink salmon to naturally occuring ocean acidification. Conservation Physiology 8(1):1-13.

      Brookson, C.B., M. Krkosek, B.P.V. Hunt, B.T. Johnson, L.A. Rogers, S.C. Godwin. 2020. Differential infestation of juvenile Pacific salmon by parasitic sea lice in British Columbia, Canada. Canadian Journal of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences

2019

      Mordecai, G. J., K. M. Miller, E. Di Cicco, A. D. Schulze, K. H. Kaukinen, T. J. Ming, S. Li, A. Tabata, A. Teffer, D. A. Patterson, H. W. Ferguson, and C. A. Suttle. 2019. Endangered wild salmon infected by newly discovered viruses. eLife 8:1–18.

      Johnson, B.T., J.C.L. Gan, S.C. Godwin, M. Krkosek, and B.P.V Hunt. 2019. Juvenile salmon migration observations in the Discovery Islands and Johnstone Strait in British Columbia, Canada in 2018. NPAFC Doc. 1838. 21 pp. Hakai Institute, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, University of British Columbia, Earth to Ocean Research Group, Simon Fraser University, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, and Salmon Coast Field Station (Available at https://npafc.org).

      James, S. 2019. Foraging ecology of juvenile Fraser River sockeye salmon across mixed and stratified regions of the early marine migration. MSc. Oceanography Thesis. University of British Columbia.

2018

      Hunt, B.P.V., B.T. Johnson, S.C. Godwin, M. Krkosek, E.A. Pakhomov, and L. Rogers. 2018. The Hakai Institute Juvenile Salmon Program: early life history of sockeye, pink and chum salmon in British Columbia, Canada. NPAFC Doc. 1788. 14 pp. Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, University of British Columbia, Hakai Institute, Earth to Ocean Research Group, Simon Fraser University, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, and Salmon Coast Field Station (Available at http://www.npafc.org).

      Johnson, B.T., J.C.L. Gan, C.V. Janusson, and B.P.V. Hunt. 2018. Juvenile salmon migration dynamics in the Discovery Islands and Johnstone Strait; 2015–2017. NPAFC Doc. 1790. 10 pp. Hakai Institute, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, University of British Columbia (Available at http://www.npafc.org)

      Mahara, N. 2018. Zooplankton community composition across a range of productivity regimes in coastal British Columbia. MSc. Oceanography Thesis. University of British Columbia.

      Godwin, S. C., M. Krkošek, J. D. Reynolds, L. A. Rogers, and L. M. Dill. 2018. Heavy sea louse infection is associated with decreased stomach fullness in wild juvenile sockeye salmon. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 75(10):1587–1595.

2017

      Godwin, S. C., L. M. Dill, M. Krkošek, M. H. H. Price, and J. D. Reynolds. 2017. Reduced growth in wild juvenile sockeye salmon Oncorhynchus nerka infected with sea lice. Journal of Fish Biology 91(1):41–57.

2015

      Godwin, S. C., L. M. Dill, J. D. Reynolds, and M. Krkosek. 2015. Sea Lice, sockeye salmon, and foraging competition: lousy fish are lousy competitors. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 1120(March):778–782.

Data

The citable version of these data are archived and can be downloaded from http://dx.doi.org/10.21966/1.566666. The development version of these data can be publicly accessed by visiting https://github.com/HakaiInstitute/jsp-time-series where we encourage users to access the data, work with it, and suggest feedback, issues, and opportunities for collaboration.

Data are open to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

We strive to make our data open and FAIR (findable, accessible, inter-operable, and re-usable). If you use any of this data in your analysis you must cite the authors of the dataset (as per the CC Attribution license), additionally we request you please communicate with the authors of the data set to facilitate a collaboration.

Citation: Johnson, B.T., Gan, J.C.L., Godwin, S.C., Krkosek, M., Hunt, B.P.V. 2019. Juvenile Salmon Program Data. Hakai Institute and Tula Foundation, Quadra Island Ecological Observatory, Heriot Bay, British Columbia, Canada. http://dx.doi.org/10.21966/1.566666.