July 26, 2021, by Alex McCarrel

The chum crew is off and running to start their 2021 field season! The crew arrived in Juneau this past week for final training before each team heads off to their respective survey location for the season. Training and preparation included practicing identifying and counting chum versus pink salmon in streams, learning the lay of the land for each creek, and purchasing and shipping last minute equipment for the Prospect Creek field camp.

While in Juneau, the crew did an amazing job building fish weirs in their respective creeks. A fish weir is a partition installed in a water body to capture fish as they move up or downstream. In this case, the fish weir will be used as a filter to catch chum salmon carcasses as they float downstream after spawning.

Another training activity was practicing using a seine net to capture live chum salmon in deeper pools. Once captured, the fish will be measured, a genetic sample taken, marked with a small plastic tag, and released to spawn upstream. This season, crew hopes to mark chum salmon and later identify their carcasses after they successfully spawn, with the information used further down the road to create a population estimate, called a mark-recapture study. Now fully trained, SSSC’s 12 crew members will embark on an exciting six-week long journey surveying streams and tagging chum salmon!