Dr. Kurt Samways is the Parks Canada Research Chair in Aquatic Restoration at the University of New Brunswick. (Image: Nigel Fearon)
A project launched in 2015 aimed at boosting the endangered inner Bay of Fundy Atlantic salmon population is seeing success.
When the Fundy Salmon Recovery project first began, the number of salmon returning to the rivers of Fundy National Park was nearly non-existent.
This year, researchers have detected more than 100 endangered Atlantic salmon returning to the park — the highest number since 1989.
Dr. Kurt Samways, the Parks Canada Research Chair in Aquatic Restoration at the University of New Brunswick, said it is promising for the conservation and recovery of this species.
The project collects juvenile salmon that have spent their early lives in rivers who are then transferred to the Wild Salmon Marine Conservation Farm on Grand Manan — the first of its kind in the world.
The salmon grow to maturity at the farm operated by Cooke Aquaculture, a project partner, and are returned to their native rivers to spawn naturally.
Samways said they track tagged salmon in the Upper Salmon and Pointe Wolfe rivers at Fundy National Park through a Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) antenna system.
“We built essentially a really big antenna, a really big reader. Imagine it’s like a gate, as the water is flowing one way and as the salmon swim upriver through this gate, it reads the tag inside them,” Samways said.
He said the salmon are returning to spawn and reproduce but they also bring nutrients with them like nitrogen and phosphorus.
“They get deposited in the river and those nutrients are then taken up. They provide additional food for the next generation of salmon. They are making the ecosystem that much healthier, that much more productive,” Samways said.
Teams also observed the largest wild-hatched smolt run in 20 years with estimates of more than 4,000 smolts migrating to the ocean, a record for Fundy National Park.
In addition to UNB and Cooke Aquaculture, the project also includes partners Parks Canada, Fort Folly First Nation and the Atlantic Canada Fish Farmers Association.
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