Fri, October 18, 2019 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM AQUATIC ECOSYSTEMS RESEARCH LABORATORY (AERL). IOF Seminar Series
Speaker: Scott Hinch
Professor, UBC Forestry
Location: AERL Theatre
Humans ‘touch’ in excess of 90 MT of fish each year through fisheries harvest involving a variety of different gears. In many cases, fish are kept and either sold or kept for personal use. However, many fish either are released or escape from capture. Bycatch makes up 40% of global commercial fish harvest and these non-targeted fish are usually released, often injured or dead, or at least to an uncertain fate. Large segments of recreational harvest are also released because of conservation or regulatory reasons. What happens to fish that we ‘touch’ and let go alive. Unseen to most fishers are fish that encounter their gear but escape from being captured. What is their fate? Over the past decade, we have been exploring these issues in adult Pacific salmon from physiological, behavioural, survival and fitness perspectives, using an individual based approach involving telemetry tracking and field experiments, and high throughput genomics to understand underlying mechanisms. We have worked directly with different fisheries and different species, in both fresh and saltwater. In this presentation, I will overview some of our key findings that involve approaches for predicting fate of released salmon, ways to minimize mortality of released salmon, the unseen impacts of escaping gear, and the overarching influence of climate change.
Some relevant references:
- Cook, K.V., A.J. Reid, D.A. Patterson, K.A. Robinson, J.M. Chapman, S.G. Hinch, and S.J. Cooke. 2018. A synthesis to understand responses to capture stressors among fish discarded from commercial fisheries and options for mitigating their severity. Fish and Fisheries. DOI: 10.1111/faf.12322 pg 1–19.
- Cook, K.V., Lennox, R.J., Hinch, S.G., Cooke, S.J. 2015. Fish out of water: How much air is too much for released fish? Fisheries 40(9):452-461
- Raby, G.D., Donaldson, M.R., Hinch, S.G., Patterson, D.A., Lotto, A.G., Robichaud, D., English, K.K., Willmore, W.G., Farrell, A.P., Davis, M.W., Cooke, S.J. 2012. Validation of reflex indicators for measuring vitality and predicting the delayed mortality of wild coho salmon bycatch released from fishing gears. Journal of Applied Ecology 49: 90-98
Others found at: http://faculty.forestry.ubc.ca/hinch/DD_Publications.html