Pink Salmon Stealing Our Catch

By Wyatt Fournier, NOAA Fisheries, on the Northwestern Explorer

Our net is not the only thing in the Gulf of Alaska trying to catch larval rockfish and arrowtooth flounder. Adult pacific salmon, a piscivorous (fish-eating) predator, will also consume our species of interest when they find them. The pink salmon shown below had a belly full of translucent, larval fish. The very fish I was hoping to catch in the net! In this way, the stomach contents of adult salmon can be utilized as another sampling mechanism.

One of the goals of the Gulf of Alaska Project is to understand the interactions between marine predators and our five fish species of interest. To observe predation rates we will collect whole stomachs from Pink, Coho and Chinook salmon that we catch in our trawl net. Diets will be determined by stomach content analysis and data will be given to our modelers to update their predation mortality rates.

Salmon Stomach