The international scientific expedition began a new grass survey of salmon in the Gulf of Alaska. As part of a scientific group of 12 scientists - three specialists of the Russian Federal Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography (VNIRO), Canadian and American scientists.
«The expedition is a continuation of international scientific research aimed at identifying mechanisms and factors of the environment that determine the annual number and condition of Pacific salmon,» said the director of VNIRO - Kirill Kolonchin.
During the expedition, scientists will study a wide range of issues: the state of fish and their age, pathogens, the DNA of the environment in samples of sea water, phyto- and zooplankton.
The Canadian ship «Pacific Legashi» came out on March 11 from Victoria (the capital of British Columbia province). The project for the study in the Gulf of Alaska of salmon of northern Pacifiki started in 2019, in the International Year of Salmon. In 2020, the flight task included a scheme of stations from the 2019 flight report, the shooting will be carried out in the same area to obtain a comparative material.
It is planned that Pacific Legashi will work for 25 days with a shift to Dutch Harbor to change part of the scientific group (scientists of the United States and Canada). The expedition will be completed in early April.
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In 2019, on the initiative of the Northern Pacific Anadromic Fish species Commission (NPAFC) and the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization (NASCO), the International Year of Salmon was launched for the first time, dedicated to the conservation of salmon species.
The first large-scale international expedition to study Pacific salmon, in which scientists of Russia, the United States, Canada, Japan and the Republic of Korea took part, was carried out on the research ship of the Federal Agency forFisheries «Professor Kaganovsky». The main purpose of the filming, which was carried out during the month, was to study the conditions for wintering salmon in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The period of oceanic humming plays a great importance for survival - it is at this time that the final number of salmon is formed, which then goes to spawning in rivers.Understanding how many salmon have survived allows scientists to precisely set the limit of possible catch that is safe for the state of the population.
During the filming in the open waters of the Gulf of Alaska, scientists met all the mass species of Pacific salmon of American herds - humpback, diet, spawning, kizucha, tea. Also, studies were carried out on the habitat conditions of Pacific salmon, fodder base, temperature, salinity, oxygen level and hydrochemical composition of water.
According to the NPAFC, total world catch of Pacific salmon after the decline in the 1950s and 1970s to 400 thousand tons has now grown to almost 1 million tons.
Press service VNIRO, Press service Federal Agency for Fisheries
