Researchers return from open-ocean Pacific salmon study

After spending more than a month at sea studying Pacific salmon, scientists and crew aboard the Sir John Franklin Coast Guard vessel returned to Victoria last week.

The ship was one of four participating in the 2022 International Year of the Salmon Pan-Pacific Winter High Seas Expedition, which was the largest-ever research expedition to study salmon and their ecosystems in the North Pacific Ocean.

The Sir John Franklin was joined in the expedition by a research vessel from the United States, a research vessel from Russia and a commercial fishing vessel from Canada.

The expedition began in January, with the objective of understanding better how increasingly extreme climate variability in the ocean and associated changes in the physical environment affect the abundance, distribution, migration and growth of Pacific salmon.

"Most of the focus of what we understand about salmon is what we understand either in fresh water or coastally," explained Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders, a salmon geneticist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, in a video produced by International Year of the Salmon.

"All of the different countries have been tracking their salmon in fresh water and coastally, and very few other than the Russians have really gone far out into the open ocean."

At a news conference on Friday, the crew of the Sir John Franklin shared some of what they discovered during their time at sea.

Dr. Jackie King, a research scientist for the DFO, said analyzing the data gathered will take months or even years, but it will help improve the scientific understanding of the ocean ecosystem.

“While the focus was on Pacific salmon, we have so much data and samples to look at for every other component of the ecosystem and we’ll be able to analyze how healthy the ecosystem is for the different levels, knowing what condition the food web is for all aspects of what lives out there, not just salmon.”