"Committed to the recovery of wild Pacific salmon in mid Vancouver
Island watersheds through habitat restoration and community engagement"
"Committed to the restoration of wild Pacific salmon in mid Vancouver
Island watersheds through habitat restoration and community engagement"

Life's a Beach

Written on .

The month of May was all about beaches for our volunteers. Check out our "Sharing Shorelines" brochure about conserving shorelines, not only for sustaining marine life (and beaches), but protecting real estate as well. Many thanks to Islands Trust who produced the original brochure and allowed us to modify it for Parksville. And MVIHES vounteer Ross Peterson who did the modifying and got it published. 

ForageFish6On May 29, Haley Tomlin from Vancouver Island University gave an excellent training session on surveying the spawning habitat of forage fish (Sand Lance and Surf Smelt) to the Qualicum Beach Streamkeepers. Of course, MVIHES just had to crash the party. You may remember, we were trained in forage fish surveys last year by Ramona de Graf using the State of Washington methodology. Haley, who is conducting these surveys on behalf of the Mount Arrowsmith Biosphere Region Research Institute, has created a "Citizen Science" program that simplifies the State of Washington method. The data collected from this program will be stored  on the Pacific Salmon Foundation website which should make it possible to identify beaches that are important for forage fish spawning when an area is being considered for development.

 

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Haley is also lending us a fancy piece of equipment called a vortex (shown in photo) that is powered by a 12 volt car battery. The vortex separates fish eggs and embryos from our sand samples and replaces the manual "panning for eggs" method we have been using. Very cool. MVIHES will continue surveying local beaches for forage fish spawning habitat. If you haven't already been involved in our surveying and you would like to participate, just drop us a line at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

 

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On May 30, Dave Clough, our consulting Biologist for many years, lead us on another beach seining session at the Englishman River estuary. We were accompanied by Emily Vance, a reporter for PQB news. Emily wrote a great article that explains all about why we beach seine.

 

Photo by Emily Vance as seen in news article 

 

See you on the beach!