Lopez volunteers share results of salmon study

Lopez citizen scientists invite the community to join them on Sunday, Dec. 28 at Lopez Center for “Salmon-ation,” a celebration and recap of their first year of research on south end salmon nurseries.

Activities include a slideshow, microscope demonstrations and food. Children are welcome.

The Lopez community salmon team was organized one year ago with technical support from the Lopez-based conservation laboratory, Kwiáht, and a donation from the Lopez Artist Guild. More than 20 Lopezians have participated in monthly beach seining and laboratory work, focusing on the diet of the juvenile salmon that spend their summers in south end bays.

Additional technical and financial support has come from NOAA, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the State’s Salmon Recovery Funding Board, and the Skagit River Systems Cooperative.

In 2008, tiny juvenile chum and pink salmon began arriving from the mainland in April, feasting mainly on small crustaceans such as amphipods and larval shrimp as well as the year’s first juvenile smelt. By June, when juvenile Chinook salmon began to arrive in significant numbers, there were fewer small crustaceans and larval fish in the water, so salmon focused more heavily on insects. Insects such as flying (mating) ants, midges and flies, mayflies, and even aphids made up half of the diet of the juvenile Chinook in Lopez waters in summer and early fall. Insects comprised 80 percent of the Chinook diet at the study’s other community site on Waldron.

This study, which will resume in April and develop into a long-term monitoring program, highlights the importance to salmon of the way we landscape our homes and lawns and gardens – in particular, our use of wetlands and ponds – and the role of surface runoff water in delivering insect larvae and adult insects to shoreline salmon nurseries.

Learn more about salmon nurseries around Lopez, what juvenile salmon eat, how we can take better care of them, and how you can volunteer at Lopez Center on Sunday, Dec. 28, from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

For more information, call Russel Barsh of Kwiáht at 468-2808 or RLBarsh@gmail.com.

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