With what may have been the last round of federal funding support, a research team gathered offshore monitoring data throughout Puget Sound once more this summer.
The Puget Sound Juvenile Salmon and Herring Offshore Monitoring Program is part of an ongoing effort to understand factors that affect salmon survival in marine environments—and the evolving influence of climate change. The Tulalip Tribes, the nonprofit Long Live the Kings and the crew of the Viking Spirit are partners in the program, conducted for the fifth consecutive year this summer.
“This program is really important because it improves our understanding of how annual marine conditions are affecting prey availability and juvenile salmon growth and survival,” said Mike Crewson, fisheries enhancement biologist for the Tulalip Tribes.
While obtaining five years of data is a good start, consistent annual monitoring is needed to identify trends in how marine conditions affect salmon survival and inform future management of fisheries and ecosystem health.
“We need to continue this essential monitoring to understand how climate is affecting our fish,” said Jason Gobin, Tulalip’s executive director of natural resources.
At 20 sites between Olympia and Bellingham, the partners collect water quality data, plankton, and information about the quantity, size and condition of salmon and forage fish. They also take samples of stomach contents and scales for ongoing research into diet and growth rates.
This offshore monitoring program grew out of the Salish Sea Marine Survival Project, which ran from 2014 to 2019. The Salish Sea Marine Survival Project brought together about 200 U.S. and Canadian scientists conducting a variety of research to identify factors behind poor marine survival of chinook and other salmonids in the Salish Sea.
Continued offshore monitoring is an important part of the puzzle.
“This program is needed by Tulalip and other tribes to better understand where and when salmon marine survival problems are developing that are hindering the efficacy of our salmon recovery efforts, so that we can adapt habitat, harvest and hatchery management under this rapidly changing climate,” Crewson said.
The offshore monitoring program was supported from 2021 through 2025 with funding from the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Tribal Climate Resilience grant program. Like many federal resources aimed at environmental science and public health research, those funds have become unreliable under the current administration.
Elisabeth Duffy, associate director of science for Long Live the Kings, said the offshore monitoring program partners are seeking a combination of state, tribal and local funds to keep the annual surveys afloat beginning next year.
“It’s really important that this time series continues growing, unbroken,” Duffy said during a break from assessing fish captures at an offshore site between Camano Island and the Tulalip Reservation.
Program partners spend about two weeks in late July aboard the Viking Spirit during monitoring. Each day, they painstakingly unwind, loop and pull in a quarter-mile-long purse seine, then sort and estimate the size of the catch and gather a portion of fish for closer examination. They also collect plankton samples, which are kept for later analysis in a lab.
As the subset of fish are examined, their species, length and weight are recorded. Chinook and coho salmon are checked for tags and marks that indicate whether they are of hatchery origin.
The stomachs of all Endangered Species Act-listed chinook and some other fish are then pumped with water from a syringe—a non-lethal procedure called gastric lavaging—so what they’ve been eating can be collected and preserved for later review in a lab.
“This one has been eating a lot of little crab and shrimp,” Duffy said, eyeballing pale contents washed from one fish into a metal sieve.
The Salish Sea Marine Survival Project previously concluded that juvenile salmon survival is impacted by pressures from both sides of the food web; the effects of climate change are altering the supply of plankton and forage fish for salmon to eat, and the growth of seal populations has increased predation.
The timing of the offshore monitoring provides a snapshot of how out-migrating salmon are faring in the food webs of Puget Sound before they move into the open ocean. Most of the fish captured are released to continue their journeys.