April 15, 2008 Beach Seine with Kurt Fresh et al · 14 April 2008, 22:12 by Julie Loyd
Kurt Fresh of NOAA Fisheries is part of the Big Picture Salmon project in the Puget Sound. Our group has volunteered to help him do monthly beach seines until fall. Also, we are collaborating with KWIAHT to look at juvenile salmon stomach contents to see how their diet relates to what’s available. Our ongoing baseline plankton project will probably feed into the conclusions we draw.
On April 15, we seined at Cowlitz Dock, Mail Bay, Little Hammond Cove, and the Chev’s Beach.
At the dock, we caught a sculpin the size of a puppy.
There were some penpoint gunnels.
There were also two mystery fish about one inch long
At Mail Bay,
there were dozens of two-inch chum salmon.
We found a starry flounder and an English sole (pointy nose, silky back, left-sided).
The net oodled with baby sculpins. A lemon nudibranch, an herbivorous underwater slug, was washed up on the beach.
At Little Hammond Cove, we decided to do gastric lavage on one of the many pinks and chum juveniles we found there to see what was in its stomach. Eventually, the plankton group will identify the contents.
At Chev’s beach, there was only time to do one seine, which gave sparse results.
commenting closed for this article