Mat-Su considers tracking fish in Cook Inlet

PALMER — So what’s the Mat-Su Borough able to do about dwindling salmon returns in local rivers?

The Mat-Su Borough Fish and Wildlife Commission met this past week to hear a proposal for one thing they can do — study the movement of fish in Cook Inlet and up Valley rivers.

Borough Assemblyman Jim Colver said in an email that there has been money handed to the borough — $2.5 million from the state capital budget — for fisheries protection, and the plan is to spend it on that kind of research.

“Our goal is to drive fisheries management decisions with sound science to restore our once-robust wild runs,” Colver wrote. “We think that commercial fishing in the middle of the inlet has decimated our fisheries in Susitna area drainages. We need science to prove it and devise more strategic, targeted harvest means, methods and locations to allow (Mat-Su)-bound fish to get through and spawn.”

On Monday, the commission heard from someone who has a plan to do that. David Welch is president of Kintama Research Services and has been working since 2000 to build a system to track fish in British Columbia.

He said that during his previous career as a biologist, he’d grown to understand that while scientists know a lot about what fish do in rivers, they don’t know much about what happens to them in the ocean.

Scientists had ideas and opinions, Welch said, but no data.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” he said.

And, he said, those ideas and opinions aren’t of much use.

“Most of the time our professional opinions or expert opinions have been wrong,” Welch said. “We haven’t had the data to sort of close the loop and test these things.”

So here’s how his system works.

Welch and his team catch fish and surgically implant them with trackers. The team also floats sensors in the area to be studied. The sensors are dropped into the water and sit close to the bottom, collecting data each time one of those sensors moves by.

This summer, he said, Kintama has been tracking fish for the state in Cook Inlet, but so far just in the Kasilof area and off of the coast of the Kenai Peninsula as far out as Kalgin Island.

It hasn’t been a great first year for the program. He was asked to start tracking fish in the inlet, meaning he used an ocean-going vessel to catch fish out there, tag them and drop them back in the water.

Due to weather and other reasons, he wasn’t able to catch as many as he’d like. And as of Monday his data wasn’t complete; there were still transmitters out there that needed to be recovered.

“I would commit that by October we can get something out from everybody so we can have a broader discussion of that we’d be able to have a better discussion on that,” he said.

But, he said, if given the opportunity he could extend his array to cover both sides of Kalgin Island and put another set around the mouth of the Susitna River. If he can get his catch rates up, he knows his system will be able to benefit Alaska.

“If you get it to 100 fish and you have lots of data on these hundred fish … then I would argue the policymakers can start making some decisions,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.