Salmon Fry at Ten Mile Point

[John Ingram]

Fishing Ten Mile Point for the last week or so I have seen wave after wave of small salmon fry enter the bay during
the slack tide. I have hit a couple of these little fry and they look like small Coho.
Anyone know what these small ones are?? and possibly where they originated.
Judging from the size of the mass I sure hope this bodes well for a future fishery somewhere.

Thanks
John I.

 

[eroyd]

Interesting. I'm no expert but chinook and coho would be bigger than just fry at this point that far from any significant stream. Chum fry (smolts) maybe?

 

[PEETZcanada]

SVIAC recently released their pen program smolts. Possibly part of that. The tides do wonderful things. Ya just never know.

 

[agentaqua]

It's pretty hard to tell w/o capturing a couple of them to look - and could even be juvie herring. But this is how they react:

Pinks & chums are the smallest and tend to hug the shorelines and shallow bays in reasonably large schools. They are fairly easy to herd - and those surf scoters (often seen in a line) are especially are adept at herding them into shallow water to capture them.

Coho are slightly larger - but don't form as large of schools and tend to hang just behind the kelp.

Chinook are slightly larger and seem to like high current areas.

Sockeye have already been trained in the lakes to avoid predators and will dive immediately if you approach them by boat - and are more in the middle of the channels.

Juvie herring wiggle more in their swimming than juvie salmon and flash alot as they are eating plankton. Often if predators like rockfish are after them - their schools ripple as they try to avoid being eaten.

 

[islandboy]

How small were they? Were they barred?
I trolled into the prop wash wake of the Cruise ship today. I was curious about any injured bait-fish given the amount of 1 to 2" minnows jumping at the surface from Sax point to the green can. Sure enough there was a trail of scales floating in the water and the odd injured silvery minnow twisting about. There was a herring spawn off Ft. Rod Hill this spring.
Herring

Coho

 

[agentaqua]

How small were they? Were they barred?
I trolled into the prop wash wake of the Cruise ship today. I was curious about any injured bait-fish given the amount of 1 to 2" minnows jumping at the surface from Sax point to the green can. Sure enough there was a trail of scales floating in the water and the odd injured silvery minnow twisting about. There was a herring spawn off Ft. Rod Hill this spring.
Herring
View attachment 107923
Coho
View attachment 107924

EXACTLY, IB! The tell-tale sign of herring - the "sparkles" you can see if the sun is out are scales dropping - something I haven't seen happening for juvie salmon.

And I'll give you my pet theory as to why herring easily loose scales - it helps them with the sea lice Caligus. Herring are often heavily infested with Caligus spp. - but that species of sea louse has a frontal filament that stays stuck into the scale it is on throughout its's early developmental 4 Chalimus stages until it becomes motile. But it's like tying someone to a post at the bus station until after the bus departed - if the herring drops the scale with the louse. So herring just grow more scales more often & drop them more often to reduce the lice loads. My pet theory.

And juvie salmon DON'T do this and their main louse species is Leps - that drill a new frontal filament each molt.

And only the marine version of the 3-spine stickleback is armoured - not the FW version. And both phenotypes have piscine & avian predators. But only the marine form is subjected to Caligus spp. loading, as well. But again - those Caligus never seem to make it all the way through their developmental phases to become mature gravid (egg-bearing) female louse - and if you have no babies - that means that sticklebacks are instead a sink verses a source of Caligus lice.

Yet another inconvenient fact that DFO ignores in their dissemination of doubt about how lice gets on juvie salmon, but I will avoid getting into that conversation as that conversation is for another thread(s):

N.S. fish farm rejected: risk to wild salmon.

A proper study would take Juvenile Coho salmon, treat half with Slice and leave the other half untreated. Tag them and release them. Record survival rates of returning adults and note if there were any differences in survival rates. Repeat for 10 years. That's how you tell if there is any...

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https://sportfishingbc.com/threads/fish-farm-siting-criteria-politics.37507/page-4#post-453035