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speakup

Out of the thousands of salmon in the Miramichi river, a handful must be feeling like they were just abducted by aliens.

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Atlantic Salmon Federation biologist Steve Tinker prepares to insert a tracking device into the belly of a fresh-caught salmon after it has been sedated. It was later released back into the river after recovery, and its movements will be tracked over the next few years.

Prepping the O.R. – Atlantic Salmon Federation biologist Steve Tinker (right) and McGill University master’s student Keelan Jacobs ready the riverside surgery tent for the first salmon to be implanted with one of 53 tracking devices.

That’s because the Miramichi Salmon Association, together with the Atlantic Salmon Federation and the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, spent a few hours last Wednesday sedating adult salmon and implanting chapstick- tube-sized tracking devices into their bellies before releasing them back into the water.

The MSA will use the gadgets to keep track of the salmon over the next year.

Most of the fish were donated by fishermen taking advantage of the sunshine and warm weather to ply the waters off the Red Bank bridge.

“They’re a lot better at it then we are,” joked Mark Hambrook, who was in the boat the association used to putter out to take the salmon off the fishermens’ hands.

Members of the Atlantic Salmon Federation were on hand with the right equipment to do the surgery, which began after a fresh-caught salmon had had some time to stew in a tank filled with a mixture of water, alcohol and clove oil.

The “surgeon,” research biologist Steve Tinker, had veterinary training and knew just how to treat the unconscious salmon.

“The transmitters are expensive. The whole technology is expensive,” Hambrook said. “You don’t want to blunder it by poor surgery.”

After the transmitter was inserted, the fish were sewn up, placed in a wooden pen in the river to recover and then sent on their way.

Around 53 salmon will be implanted with the transmitters, which cost around $700 and were financed mostly by fundraisers around the province.

The implanted salmon will be tracked as they leave the river for the open ocean, joining large schools that will pass through Newfoundland’s strait of Belle Isle on their way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Thanks to the technology in the transmitters, the MSA will be able to track each salmon by their individual codes when they pass underwater receivers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The data will be used by the MSA and other agencies to study salmon habits at sea.

ASF biologist Steve Tinker says the last attempt to track Miramichi salmon this way was four years ago and met with mixed success.

“The problem with that one is, it turned out to be the weekend of the big fishing derby out here, so I think that’s where some of them disappeared to,” he laughed.