Grant: Alliance Grants

Atlantic salmon is a culturally important species in Canada that has declined precipitously in recent years with urbanisation of many rivers and climate change affecting ocean habitat and feeding conditions. Juvenile Atlantic salmon that migrate to sea from rivers in Atlantic Canada are growing more slowly at sea and returning less frequently. Nowhere have the shifts been as extreme as in the inner Bay of Fundy, a genetically distinct designatable unit that has been listed by the Species At Risk Act as Canada's only Endangered population. Inner Bay of Fundy Atlantic salmon are also behaviourally unique, in that they do not migrate long distances to the Labrador Sea as salmon from other parts of the country and from the United States do; the inner Bay of Fundy salmon are believed to complete their life cycle in and around the Bay of Fundy, feeding and growing more locally before returning to rivers. The SARA Recovery Strategy and Action Plan have both identified marine distribution, critical habitat, and predation as knowledge gaps that hinder the conservation of salmon from this designatable unit. In this project, we are leveraging funds from Fisheries and Oceans Canada to create a comprehensive tracking project of the inner Bay of Fundy Atlantic salmon. The project makes use of existing tracking infrastructure in the Bay of Fundy including a new deployment of a major grid array in the outer Bay of Fundy that provides unprecedented potential to understand where and when these salmon are in their marine distribution. The project entails tracking live gene bank (hatchery raised) salmon smolts and kelts as well as a small but important effort to track some wild kelts from legacy rivers where there may be small numbers of remanent salmon. We will also work with DFO researchers to track porbeagle sharks within this important new tracking array, which is considered to be the major predator of Atlantic salmon kelts at sea. The project will fill gaps in the Recovery Strategy and Action Plan and provide Fisheries and Oceans Canada with data necessary to turn the tide for this Endangered species before it is lost forever to extinction.