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THE EMBARGO HAS LIFTED ON THIS RELEASE

 

Contact:
Mr. Terry Collins, +1-416-878-8712; +1-416-538-8712; terrycollins@rogers.com

 

Experts are available for interviews.
High resolution videos and images are available below.

 


Scientists Achieve First Tracking of Small Salmon from Headwaters in Rockies through Pacific to Alaska

New tagging system follows fortunes of juvenile salmon in both rivers and ocean;

 

Curtain rising on some of nature’s longest-held secrets

Scientists have proven new miniature tagging and tracking technologies can follow the travels of small salmon through vast distances and highly dissimilar waters – from as far as the Rocky Mountain headwaters of USA’s Columbia River through the ocean to the coast of Alaska.

 

And, experts say, the breakthrough opens the window on a world of opportunities to reveal some of Mother Nature’s most closely guarded secrets.

 

Over the last decade, researchers have used tags to follow larger ocean dwellers such as sharks, sturgeon, tuna and sea turtles, and to follow migrations of mature salmon along marine coasts. 

 

Now for the first time they have tagged and directly tracked small juvenile Pacific salmon, from their release in freshwater far upriver to distant ocean destinations, a major step towards understanding the full life experience and decline of this species.

 

For more details view the full press release, available for download below.

 

Downloads

 

 

  • Animation of juvenile salmon migrations from the Snake and Thompson Rivers, tributaries of the Columbia and Fraser respectively. If you cannot automatically view the animation, download and install the codec found here: http://www.xvidmovies.com/codec/. Lines of acoustic receivers are shown in magenta. Red and blue dots show fish movements along the coast as far north as the line at Graves Harbor, AK (top left corner). In some cases, movements have been shown as a straight line where there is uncertainty about the exact path taken.
  • A high resolution (45MB) version of this animation can be found here.

 

  • Images (high resolution) -- a text file with image descriptions and credit lines is included in the compressed folder.

 

  • For a larger set of images including a slide show, go to POST's Photo Gallery


For more information about the Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking (POST) Project visit the POST website.
For more information on the Census of Marine Life visit www.coml.org.


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