A Canadian-based effort to track salmon and other sea-going creatures up the North Pacific coast's continental shelf will flower this spring and summer --  detailing fish movements and survival trends that have to this point been unavailable to fish managers.

The project will utilize the latest technological acoustic sensors to log the progress of electronically tagged fish, from the Columbia River and elsewhere.

The Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking project (POST) was assured the last piece of its funding puzzle this month when the Northwest Power and Conservation Council freed up $1.5 million it had earmarked from its Fish and Wildlife Program budget. Funding had been contingent on the project proponents' satisfying the concerns of the NPCC's Independent Scientific Review Panel.

The proposal had the backing of the Bonneville Power Administration, which funds the Council program and issues contracts for recommended work. The Acoustic Tracking for Studying Ocean Survival research project is part of the larger POST effort that includes funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Gordon and Mary Moore Foundation, the Census of Marine Life, the Pacific Salmon Commission and the Canadian government.

Washington Councilor Larry Cassidy, who is also a member of the Pacific Salmon Commission, said the information gleaned from the POST project about the migration patterns of the fish and about survival could influence decision-making regarding harvests and freshwater management of salmon and steelhead stocks.

"This is one of the most important things we could be doing right now," Cassidy said.

The project is also important to BPA and other federal agencies who together developed the 2004 biological opinion on the impacts of Columbia/Snake river hydrosystem operations on protected salmon and steelhead stocks. The POST study will help address the status of those listed stocks and critical uncertainties regarding their welfare.

The federal agencies' Updated Proposed Action, the operations and off-site mitigation judged by the BiOp, says the POST projects can develop an ability to allow the assessment of early marine survival and ocean movements for the ESA-listed fish and other stocks.

Implementing the project this year with the deployment of new acoustic receivers or "nodes" will cost about $4 million total, according to Kintama Research Corporation's David Welch, the tracking strategy's originator.

The total project includes deployment of six picket lines or "arrays" nodes that will sense and record data from passing fish with surgically implanted, coded acoustic tags. Advancements in the development of tags and receivers allow an unprecedented ability to monitor individual movements. The new acoustic sensors have a life of up to seven years.

Once in place six arrays will track fish movements from Cascade Head, about 80 miles south of the mouth of the Columbia, to Icy Strait in southeastern Alaska. In all, the arrays will track fish for about 1,750 kilometers. The width of the continental shelf, and thus the arrays, averages from about 20 to 25 kilometers, Welch said.

The POST project ultimately plans to complete the permanent full-scale marine telemetry array along the North American Pacific coast, from Baja to the Bering Sea, by 2010. The array will have 2000 receivers and 30 listening lines, each up to 50 km long, according to the project web site. Capable of listening to over 250,000 animals at once, it will permit a near-complete census of the movements and marine survival of animals ranging from small salmon smolts to large marine mammals.

The array strategy has proven out during demonstration phases from April through September in 2004 and 2005. It attempted to evaluate the scientific value and feasibility of building a permanent large-scale ocean telemetry system for studying the marine phase in the life history of salmon and other marine animals.

"We had very nearly 100 percent detection over the lines" of radio tagged fish during the demonstration phase, Welch said. Among the 19 Canadian and U.S. stocks tagged during the demonstration phase are Snake and Yakima river spring chinook salmon. Those stocks will be tracked again this year as they leave the freshwater and head north.

The Snake River chinook have shown rapid acclimation to saltwater and strong determination to head north, taking inside passage along the shelf past Vancouver Island at an average pace of two body lengths per second. They dally little in the Columbia's freshwater/saltwater plume before moving northward 20 to 25 kilometers per day. If a human swam at a two-body-length-per-second pace, he'd circumnavigate the planet in 230 days, Welch said.

In that test tracking, it was estimated that about 30 percent of the young Snake River chinook survived from release below Bonneville Dam to the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Given an average smolt-to-adult return rate of about 0.5 percent and factoring in in-river survival, that means only one in 60 of the fish survive their North Pacific sojourn.

"It certainly looks like it's happening later," Welch said of apparent heavy mortality after the fish leave the ocean shelf. He did caution that data is limited and would be expanded through tracking this year and beyond.

That permanent array will be put in place, partially next month with the balance strung along the ocean floor in June.

The idea is to gain information that will help guide fish management in the future. Among the key answers being sought are: 1) the timing and rate of migration; 2) the residence locations of different fish species; and 3) differences in stock and species behavior -- and directly measure survival. Welch said the array will provide information on the critical times and geographic locations where marine survival is affected.

"We've never had more than a vague notion of where they are going," Welch said this week as he and his team prepared for the April start of their study's field season. The new acoustic sensors have the capability to record and transmit information about such ocean conditions as salinity, temperature, currents and plankton density so researchers will know not only where the fish are going, but what they might encounter.

Such monitoring, which Welch hopes can be incorporated into the study plan within the next two or three years, can be used to evaluate, for example, how conditions change when an El Nino prevails. The arrays could also help evaluate how fish movements and survivals might alter during those changing conditions along their migratory path.

Among the arrays strung along the ocean floor are two on the outer shelf north of the mouth of the Columbia River and one south of the river's mouth. They are included in the funding package recommended by the Council. One of the arrays will be near Willapa Bay off the southern Washington coast and another at Topknot Point on north Vancouver Island , B.C.

Because both of those arrays are longer, and more expensive, than anticipated, only one array of receivers will be strong along the shelf south of the Columbia River, at Cascade Head. It was decided to move that array south to Cascade Head because the preferred site near Tillamook, Ore., would not fit the budget. The array at Tillamook, where the continental shelf is wider, would require 63 sensors as opposed to 29 at Cascade Head.

The Cascade Head site is less desirable for tracking Columbia River salmon, because it is 60 to 70 miles farther south of the Tillamook site. Many of the Columbia River fish don't dip that far south. It is believed most of the Columbia stocks migrate north along the shelf and then disappear out into the vast ocean for most of their maturation.

"That's the theory," Welch said of northerly migration that has mostly proven out in limited tracking done over the past few years. Welch, who heads up the project, said that he believed the Cascade Head site would yield information regarding the extent of southern exploration by the fish.

"It's going to get things started," Welsh said. Shifting back to the Tillamook site could prove warranted next year.

For more information go to http://www.postcoml.org/index.html