About the Program
Millions of salmon smolts leave the rivers and streams of British Columbia every spring to migrate to the ocean, and yet, only a fraction make it back to spawn as adults. Salmon face a multitude of challenges across their life cycle, but which challenges are having the greatest impact?
Where is the “bottleneck” to their survival occurring, what’s causing it, and what can be done?
The Bottlenecks to Survival Program, a collaboration led by the Pacific Salmon Foundation and the BC Conservation Foundation, is working with communities along the east coast of Vancouver Island to answer these questions. Each year, salmon are tagged with Passive Integrated Transponder, or PIT, tags in hatcheries, rivers, estuaries, and out in the ocean, to help us break down a salmon’s survival into phases that can better help us identify areas where bottlenecks may be occurring.
Check out our data products below to learn from the data collected in this project.
Adult PIT Tag Returns Dashboard
Since 2020, the Bottlenecks program has PIT tagged over 300,000 Chinook and coho salmon across 11 watersheds on Vancouver Island. With PIT arrays in each of these river systems, we are able to detect those tagged fish that have survived and made it home to spawn. This dashboard illustrates the number of PIT tagged Chinook and coho salmon returning this year across the east coast of Vancouver Island. Detections are uploaded weekly for near real-time tracking!
Orphan PIT Tag Detection Dashboard
Currently, the Bottlenecks to Survival Program operates 26 antenna arrays spanning 13 rivers. Over the last four years of operation, thousands of individual PIT-tagged fish have been detected on our arrays. While many detections are from Bottlenecks fish, a few thousand are from other unknown tagging programs.
The Orphan PIT Tags Dashboard was created to help track down the owners of these mystery or “orphan” tags, and to encourage other researchers to do the same with any orphan tags detected by their program; essentially a PIT tag Lost-and-Found. Every tag counts and by using this dashboard we hope to gain as much information from the tags out there as possible.
Visit our Orphan PIT Tag Dashboard too look for your tags or share your orphan tags!
RESOURCES
For more information about this program visit the Bottlenecks to Survival website.