A dockside sampler takes scales off of a caught salmon.
Photo courtesy Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife
It takes a huge amount of effort to maintain salmon fishing in Washington.
When out recreationally fishing for salmon in Washington state, there is a good chance of running into Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) dockside staff asking questions and inspecting any fish caught. Although slightly intrusive, it is part of the terms and conditions involved in purchasing a fishing license. All the information the dockside staff collect is sent to the WDFW and goes towards determining regulations and quotas for future fishing seasons.
Some of the questions you may be asked by the dockside staff are: “When did you start and stop fishing?”; “Which marine area did you fish in?”; “How many fish were encountered, either caught or released?”; and “How many people were fishing?”
Any salmon caught are inspected in different ways depending on the species. Chinook and Coho salmon are the most common in our state. There are also distinctions between wild or hatchery raised salmon, determined on if the adipose fin located near the tail has been removed by hatchery staff.
One inspection that is performed is checking to see if the salmon is tagged. WDFW Puget Sound Sampling Unit Manager Ann Stephenson said that a member of the dockside staff will run a device similar to a metal detector over the head of each hatchery fish caught, searching for a coded wire tag.
This millimeter-long piece of metal contains a unique code that identifies an individual or group of fish that were released at the same place and time. The tag is inserted in the snout of juvenile salmon from a hatchery, which if detected, the dockside staff member will remove the snout and send it to the WDFW labs in Olympia for analysis.
“Coded wire tags give the hatchery of origin and information on the release group associated with the tag,” Tyler Garber, a fisheries data modeler at the WDFW who tracks Coho salmon, said in an email.
When a Chinook salmon is inspected, the dockside staff will take scale samples. This may also be performed on Coho if a particular study is being done at that time. Stephenson said that the scales are “like tree rings on a tree” and help identify the age of the salmon.
After sending the samples and information to the WDFW labs in Olympia, the data collected is used in aiding predictive models, such as the Fishery Regulation Assessment Model (FRAM), which estimates the impact on fisheries of Chinook and Coho stocks.
Every year, information learned from both computer data models and real-world sampling is used to determine the fishing quotas for the different fisheries. Some fisheries are more constraining on the number of fish allowed for harvesting and when the season will be open.
All of this effort is to help ensure that the salmon population is maintained and that fishing in Washington does not disappear due to overfishing.
“Thirty thousand hours a year are spent monitoring our fisheries, making Washington the most intensely monitored region in the country, if not the world,” Garber said.
