Port Gamble S’Klallam Participates in NaGISA Project
The Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe was the first group in Washington State to contribute to a worldwide coastal biodiversity census through the NaGISA Project. The tribe and volunteers spent a…
Volunteers Sought for Tribal Crab Study
The instrument is quite simple to use – attach a mesh bag filled with mesh kitchen scrubbers to a small buoy and place the contraption in Puget Sound. Although simple in construction, this technique for capturing baby crab has been utilized successfully worldwide for a long time.
Fortunately for tribal biologists, once post-larval crabs are ready to settle, they will grab a hold of the first thing that provides enough texture for them to hold onto. By placing the scrubbers along the nearshore, the goal is to capture a subsample of the crab as they wash towards the shore to settle. Thus, with a little luck, when the buoy is pulled 24 hours later, there will be dozens of young Dungeness crabs larvae attached.
Tribes monitor fish in nearshore ‘nursery’
LA CONNER— Nearly every day in the spring through early fall, somewhere in the Skagit basin and San Juan Islands, a crew from the Skagit River System Cooperative (SRSC) is sampling fish populations.
Rain or shine, in smooth waters or blustery wind, the crew pulls beach seines and sets fyke traps to count and measure fish before returning them to the water. Crew members also record water temperature, salinity, depth, velocity, substrate and vegetation. As a result, SRSC, the natural resources arm of the Swinomish and Sauk-Suiattle tribes, has a 15-year (and counting) comprehensive database of the way fish use nearshore habitat.
The nearshore is a nursery to a variety of fish including sculpins, perch, smelt, herring and salmon. Puget Sound chinook salmon, listed as “threatened” by the federal Endangered Species Act, depend on estuaries for extended rearing during outmigration.
Monitoring this habitat is a crucial, yet often underfunded, aspect of the salmon recovery effort, said Eric Beamer, SRSC’s research director. Without it, nobody knows whether a restoration project did what it was supposed to do. (more…)