March 3, 2017 • Seaside Signal • seasidesignal.com • 3A
BIOLOGIST SPEAKS AT SEASIDE LIBRARY
Life in the river
Understanding the migration
patterns of salmon
By Katherine Lacaze
For Seaside Signal
C
ommunity members delved
beneath the surface and got a
glimpse of salmonid life cycles
and behavior in northern coast-
al river basins during a presentation
by Oregon Department of Fish and
Wildlife research biologist Derek Wi-
ley.
Wiley, the assistant project leader
for the department’s North Coast Sal-
monid Life Cycle Monitoring Project,
gave a presentation on “Life in the
River” at the Seaside Public Library
on Feb. 15. It was the second presen-
tation for the Listening on the Land
winter lecture series, put on by the
Necanicum Watershed Council and
North Coast Land Conservancy.
Since 1998, the project has been
monitoring the survival and down-
stream migration of salmon in coastal
river basins, such as the North Fork
Nehalem River, whose basin contains
about 48 miles of Coho rearing and
spawning habitat. Using a GoPro
camera on the job and while fl y fi sh-
ing, Wiley has captured footage that
documents project activities from the
fall 2015 fi eld season.
“I thought it would be really inter-
esting to try and capture what we do
in a documentary-style format,” he
said. “Documentaries can give you
a really powerful look at a topic or a
project in a way a conventional pre-
sentation just can’t do.”
A wet, rough season
The life cycle monitoring project
was initiated with two goals in mind.
First, to estimate the abundance of
returning adult salmonids and down-
stream migrating juvenile salmonids.
Second, to estimate freshwater and
marine survival rates of Coho salmon.
The documentary follows the
2015 fall adult trapping season,
which started Oct. 1, with weather
forecasts predicting a mild and dry
fall and winter.
With strong El Niño conditions
present and warm sea surface tem-
peratures in the Pacifi c Ocean, the
season on the North Fork Nehalem
began with low water levels. As adult
salmon started making their way up
the river, staff drove “through stormy
conditions to greet them,” the docu-
mentary states.
The department of fi sh and wild-
life operates two adult traps on the
Nehalem, at Waterhouse Falls and at
Fall Creek Falls, further upstream. All
wild salmon that travel through the
Waterhouse Falls trap are processed,
which includes tagging them and
collecting biological data. The ratio
of tagged to untagged fi sh recovered
as carcasses in spawning surveys and
captured alive at the adult traps is
used to make population estimates for
all species.
Hatchery fi sh who go through the
trap are processed and euthanized
there, and then donated to the Oregon
Food Bank or used for stream enrich-
ment.
“Eliminating as many hatchery
fi sh as possible from reaching the
spawning grounds is extremely im-
portant in the conservation and pro-
tection of wild fi sh,” the documentary
states.
Another part of the data collection
process is completing spawning sur-
veys by walking or canoeing along
river tributaries. After spawning, sal-
monids die, so their carcasses can be
found on or near spawning grounds.
The staff fi nds the carcasses and
checks for tagged fi sh to help calcu-
late population estimates.
Contrary to predictions, the fall
and winter of 2015 were not dry and
mild. In mid-November, the fi rst of a
number of strong storms spattered the
coast, bringing gale force winds, de-
bris and fl ooding that created unsafe
conditions for processing fi sh at the
traps and conducting surveys.
“Over the course of a month and
a half, fl ooding and continually high
fl ows forced us to close the adult traps
for an unprecedented 20 days,” the
documentary states.
The fall trapping season ended
Jan. 16, with staff entering data and
running population estimates.
The documentary shared some of
the data collected. Notably, the num-
ber of Coho salmon who were caught
and who spawned were less than the
project average. The marine survival
rate for Coho was estimated at 3.3.
percent, lower than the project high
of 21 percent in 2014 and the project
average of 15 percent. The fi sh also
were smaller than normal.
The number of wild Chinook
caught for the season, 196, was be-
low the project high of 349 in 1999,
but higher than the project average
of 175. However, capture effi ciency
was low because of high river fl ows
and trap closures, and a majority of
Chinook still jump Waterhouse Falls
rather than traveling through the trap.
Because of the low capture effi ciency,
the staff had reduced confi dence in its
data regarding Chinook spawning es-
timates.
Only 147 hatchery fi sh were do-
nated to the food bank, below the
project average of 295 per year.
The documentary raised several
questions that were unable to be an-
swered at the time, but which Wiley
addressed having information from
the 2016 season, as well.
Silver salmon
Program in jeopardy
KATHERINE LACAZE/FOR SEASIDE SIGNAL
Derek Wiley (center), assistant project leader of the Oregon Department
of Fish and Wildlife’s Salmonid Life Cycle Monitoring Project, talks with
attendees after presenting for “Life in the River,” at the Seaside Public
Library.
‘An impact everywhere
you look’
Some the struggles salmonids
face along the various stages of their
life-cycle, from birth to spawning,
include the unnaturally warm sur-
face water temperatures in the Pa-
cifi c Ocean along the coast; extreme
weather events, like those that took
place in late 2015; and poor habitat
in the river systems, to name a few.
“The good thing about a monitor-
ing project like this is you capture all
that variability,” Wiley said.
Since 2010, the project has had
the top three population estimates
on the number of wild Coho in the
North Fork Nehalem, as well as its
lowest estimate and one of its lowest
estimates.
“If you take a snapshot of one
(year) at a time, and you get the good
year, your conclusion on the condi-
tion of the resource, or condition of
the fi sh, is very different than if you
continually monitor and keep track,”
Wiley said.
As of Feb. 6, data from the Na-
Tracking the brown pelican
Skimming the waves and
plummeting beak-fi rst for fi sh,
the California brown pelican
is one of the most iconic and
easily recognizable seabirds on
the Oregon Coast. On Wednes-
day, March 15, at 6 p.m. join
Astoria wildlife biologist
Deborah Jaques at the Sea-
side Public Library to explore
the natural history of brown
pelicans, from their breeding
grounds off Mexico to their
summer feeding grounds off
our own coast.
Use of DDT and other pes-
ticides decimated breeding
populations of brown pelicans
off southern California by the
early 1970s. Pelicans recov-
ered from the
pesticide era,
but their num-
bers continue
to rise and fall,
impacted by
Deborah
environmen-
Jaques
tal conditions
here and in
their breeding grounds and by
natural and unnatural mortal-
ity events. Astoria biologist
Jaques has been closely ob-
serving brown pelicans since
the 1980s. Jaques is an in-
dependent wildlife biologist
based out of Astoria. Her work
over the past 30 years has tak-
en her from the coastal margins
of Antarctica to the Olympic
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Peninsula and has most often
involved seabirds and other
colonial water birds. Jaques
did her graduate research at
the University of California,
Davis, on California brown
pelican habitat use and dis-
tribution in the non-breeding
range, including evaluation of
northern range expansion and
communal roosting behavior.
Brown pelicans are a focus of
her monitoring and conserva-
tion efforts on the West Coast.
Listening to the Land is a
monthly winter speaker series
offered January through May
in partnership with the Seaside
Public Library. For more infor-
mation, visit NCLCtrust.org.
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tional Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad-
ministration showed water tempera-
tures were more favorable for marine
survival, although they were still
higher than normal. The administra-
tion’s graphs on water temperature
are updated frequently.
Wiley said ocean conditions are
a contributing factor to survival for
salmonids, but it is one of the factors
most diffi cult to address by a single
agency or on the small scale.
“We don’t have a lot of control
over the ocean conditions, because
that will have to be solved on a global
scale,” he said.
However, other contributing fac-
tors — such as restrictions to refuges,
eliminating hatchery fi sh before they
can spawn with wild salmon and im-
proving habitats — can be addressed
at the local level.
“That’s small scale, but every-
thing we can do is going to help,”
Wiley said. “But as far as one impact,
it all goes together. And in certain
years, one might be more important
than the other. Cumulatively, there’s
an impact everywhere you look.”
As part of a plan to reduce the de-
partment of fi sh and wildlife’s budget,
the life-cycle monitoring project may
be defunded starting in the 2017-18
fi scal year. The department was re-
quested to offer two budget reduction
strategies, one to decrease the budget
by 10 percent and one by 15 percent.
The program was part of the strategy
at the 10-percent level, Necanicum
Watershed Council Coordinator Mel-
yssa Graeper said. The matter now is
in the hands of the Joint Committee on
Ways and Means, with numerous state
legislative sessions still to take place.
If the program is eliminated, the
continuity developed by collecting
data for nearly two decades would be
lost, undermining the work that’s been
accomplished.
She urged the attendees to contact
state representatives and express in-
terest in the program’s survival.
A closer look at
fi sh behavior
Another fi lm shared during the
presentation showed the underwater
behavior and spawning activities of
chum salmon, fall Chinook salmon,
Coho salmon and Pacifi c lamprey. All
the footage was captured on the north
coast in a variety of rivers.
Wiley put together the video for
the Oregon chapter of the American
Fisheries Society’s annual meeting in
Seaside last year.
“It’s just a snapshot of a bunch
different behaviors and a bunch of
different things I’ve captured with the
GoPro,” Wiley said.
The next Listening to the Land
presentation will be held from 6 to 8
p.m. March 15 at the Seaside Public
Library. The topic will be “Tracking
the Brown Pelican,” presented by As-
toria biologist Deborah Jaques.