Genetic Testing Helps Both Salmon and the People that Catch Them
Jeff Barnard of the Associated Press reports that Oregon and California salmon fishermen have seen declining numbers of fish in recent years. Scott Boley, a skipper of a salmon troller, a partner in Fishermen Direct Seafood and a member of the federal panel that selects the fishing season for ocean salmon, returned from three days of fishing with only 17 fish caught. The catch in Oregon and California was cut “nearly 90 percent this summer to protect dwindling returns of wild chinook to California’s Klamath River.”
This situation has led to some creative thinking in search of a solution in the interests of both the fish and the fishermen.
As part of a pilot program funded by the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, Boley and other trollers are clipping a piece of pectoral fin from each fish they catch and sending it to the Hatfield Marine Science Center for DNA testing that shows within 48 hours what river basin it came from.
Using a Global Positioning System receiver, they log into a computer the latitude and longitude of each fish, plus their names, the date, the water temperature and the depth at which the fish was caught.
Then they tie onto each fish a metal tag carrying a barcode, which can be used in the future to access that information from a Web site.
The goal is to gain data and “unprecedented detail” regarding which salmon are located in a certain area. This will allow fishery managers to direct the fishing fleet in a manner that will protect endangered fish.
A similar system exists in Canada, where they conduct “overnight genetic testing to increase the salmon harvest off the coast of British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands while protecting weak stocks on the west coast of Vancouver Island.” As a result of this successful program, “Queen Charlottes fishermen are now landing an extra $17 million worth of salmon a year, said Terry Beacham, research scientist with the department’s Pacific Biological Station. Meanwhile, the harm to the weak stocks from Vancouver Island is less.”
The researchers use 13 genetic markers on the salmon genome to determine the native river basin of a particular fish. They can even “distinguish between the winter, spring and fall runs of chinook from California’s Sacramento River.”
Hopefully, this practice is a harbinger of creative uses of genetic testing to further the preservation of species.
[Photo of Chinook Salmon from Wikipedia]
