Fisheries

Upon arriving at Nash Harbor, we immediately began work for our fisheries class. Our instructor was only going to stay for the first week. Imagine cramming a semester’s worth of work not into the original three weeks, but in one! We were doing a minimum of four hours a day, which comprised of a lecture/lab and then field work. Of course, our field work was a lot more interesting. This consisted of setting mino traps, beach seining, and stirring up the gravel to catch macroinvertibrates, tiny insect like critters that live in the water. We caught a total of eight different species of fishes including Chum, Sockeye, Pink, Dolly Varden juvenile, Dolly Varden adult, 3 spine stickleback, 9 spine stickleback, Blackfish, and Starry Flounder.

The most interesting fish caught, in my opinion, was the starry flounder. I had never seen a flounder before so I was really interested in the fish. The flounder is generally a salt water fish, but we caught a few right where the freshwater stream runs into the ocean. We captured this species by beach seining. This is where two people take a net and drag it along the ocean floor, catching fish in the process. The fish that are caught at the start of the seine can’t escape because the force of the water presses them against the net. Flounder spend their time on the bottom of the ocean, so we were able to catch quite a few of them.

Nash Harbor offers good habitat for this fish. These fish prefer soft bottoms with depths from a few meters to 375 meters. They are also found upriver to the limit of tides, staying in the marshes. The starry flounder possesses the following characteristics: they live 4-6 years, can be found from the northern coast of Alaska down to California, spawn in shallow marshy areas, feed on crustacean, grow up to 91 cm, and can weigh up to 9.1kg.

-Kyle

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2007 at 11:31 am and is filed under Summer Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.