Orcas seventh and eighth-graders and high schoolers in the Marine Tech program took a rockfish cruise on the University of Washington’s 58-foot research vessel Centennial last week with the Kwiaht Center for the Historical Ecology of the Salish Sea director Russel Barsh.
Led by fish biology professor Dr. Gene Helfman and fish biologist Dr. Larry Moulton, the students conducted underwater video surveys of rockfish between Orcas and Shaw using the university’s remotely operated submarine.
“The big yellow gadget that looks like the Mars Lander is the university’s ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle), a self-contained little submarine with electric motors, lights, and a video camera that is piloted from a control panel aboard Centennial,” said Barsh. “It enables us to peek into habitats too deep or too dangerous for SCUBA divers -and also to stay down longer and record everything on video together with GPS coordinates, time, depths etc. ROV has been the state department of fish and wildlife’s preferred method for conducting inventories of fish on deep rocky reefs for the past 10 years.”
He added that he knows of only three or four such devices in the state, owned by the Navy, the state government, and the UW.
“The two day survey aimed to determine whether large schools of rockfish, which I observed from Centennial last September, were a seasonal phenomenon associated with (for example) large swarms of shrimp that were also present,” said Barsh. “We saw “normal” rockfish behavior last week (lots of fish, but solitary), so it would appear that schooling is seasonal.”
Barsh said schooling was observed in the summer to early fall in the islands in the 1970s, but further research was not conducted and the conventional wisdom has been that the adults of most rockfish species live consistently solitary lives. He hopes to confirm that rockfish school seasonally when the vessel conducts another survey around Labor Day.
Kwiaht’s next objective is to find out whether some particular prey resources, such as migrating shrimp, are the cause of the schooling behavior, and then work to protect that prey and the places where rockfish school to eat it.
Barsh said the project was funded privately by a dozen Orcas residents who wanted to support getting local kids out doing real research on the Centennial.
Tour the Centennial
On May 14 the public will have an opportunity to tour the Centennial at a kid-friendly Friday Harbor Labs open house from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Visitors can meet scientists and students at the labs, and check out lab equipment, microscopes, plankton samples, marine plants and animals and more.
People can step aboard and tour the Centennial, and check out its remotely operated vehicle (ROV), oceanographic tools, and high-tech sonar systems. There will also be a demonstration of SCUBA equipment and a SCUBA dive from the dock.
