Salmon Tracker: A foray into the tools and techniques we use to track salmon in their freshwater habitats

This talk will provide an overview of the technologies we use to track salmon during their various freshwater life history stages and how this data is used to inform habitat conservation and population recovery. The biotelemetry tags most commonly employed for tracking fish movements through river systems are acoustic telemetry, radiotelemetry, and Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) telemetry tags. This presentation will review how these different technologies work, their common applications in salmon research, how salmon biologists choose the best tag for their research, and highlight some key projects where Dr. Sherker learned something cool about salmon using biotelemetry. If you ever wondered how we got to know so much about what salmon do and when they do it, this talk is for you.

Dr. Zachary Sherker is a post-doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Sciences at Oregon State University. His work focuses on implementing fish tracking technologies to assist with salmon conservation science. Zachary has designed and developed over 50 novel noise-cancelling Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) antennae for tracking juvenile salmon movements through human-made structures in rivers, such as floodgates, culverts, and fishways. During his post-doc, Zachary has led studies tracking wild and hatchery-origin spring Chinook spawners to compare migration behaviours and identify potential overlap on spawning grounds using radiotelemetry tags, and is currently employing acoustic telemetry techniques to track juvenile salmon outmigration timing and survival to ocean entry. In his free time, Zachary enjoys playing the drums loud enough to drown out the sound of his neighbours' complaints.