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.
Southern BC Microtroll Samples
In 2020, the Bottlenecks to Marine Survival Project began through funding provided by the BC Salmon Restoration and Innovation Fund. This partner program led by the Pacific Salmon Foundation and the BC Conservation Foundation, aims to collect data and provide information on when and where survival bottlenecks occur in the Freshwater and Marine stages for Chinook and Coho Salmon and Steelhead Trout.
The following tool allows users to visualize and break down microtroll data collected by the Bottlenecks Project. It offers the functionality to filter the graph both spatially (by selecting areas on the map) or by attributes (by selecting options on the sidebar). As you use it, make sure that the map and the graph match the species in order to observe the correct trends. Enjoy as you dive deeper into the Chinook and Coho Salmon microtroll data!
Orphan PIT Tags 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.