Depending on how you measure it, juvenile sockeye salmon spend minutes to days in the vici ... read more » Kintama has released an animation showing the migration of adult Chinook and Coho salmon a ... read more » New research by Dr David Welch and his team from Kintama Research Services shows that surv ... read more »	Home Lost & Found Latest News Acoustic Arrays Acoustic Arrays Advantages and Public Policy Array Design Array Deployment Surgical Tagging Applications Applications Testing the Effect of Fish Farms on Salmon Survival (TEFFS) Fraser River Sockeye Survival Salmon Survival With/Without Dams Salmon Survival After Transport Around Dams Delayed Mortality from Dam Passage Our Services Our Services Study Design Array Deployment Surgical Tagging Data Management Receiver Protection Publications Visualizations Photo Gallery Photo Gallery Tagging Receivers and Gear Deployment Trips FAQs About Kintama About Kintama Our History Our Vision Leadership Team Advisory Board Awards and Recognition Contact Us Links Search
Click here to go to our animator to see the freshwater and early marine migration of wild juvenile Sockeye salmon migrating from Chilko Lake B.C. in 2017. We tracked their movements with an acoustic-telemetry array in order to find mortality hotspots and to understand migration behaviours. After entering the ocean, the fish turned north and migrated through the inside passage between Vancouver Island and the Mainland B.C. In the Discovery Islands area of the Inside Passage, there is considerable debate about the role of open-net-pen Atlantic Salmon farms in the decline of wild Salmon stocks. We deployed a purpose-built array of acoustic receivers in this region to obtain the first individual-level data on route use, migration timing, and potential exposures to these farms. You can zoom the animation to get a closer look at the Discovery Islands. Our publication which presents the results of this aspect of the project (Rechisky EL, Porter AD, Winchell PM, Johnston SD, Stevenson CF, Hinch SG, Hunt BPV, and Welch DW (2021) Exposure time of wild, juvenile sockeye salmon to open-net-pen Atlantic Salmon farms in British Columbia, Canada. North American Journal of Fisheries Management. doi: 10.1002/nafm.10574) is available by request from us or from the journal as full or limited shared access.

Array Design

Acoustic arrays

ARRAY DESIGN

Kintama’s 1^st generation array design was realized as the Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking (POST) Project in the Pacific Northwest, and is the design basis for the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN). At its simplest level, this array design allows scientists to investigate where marine animals migrate. It also gave Kintama and collaborating scientists the opportunity to test hypotheses about survival pressures on endangered salmon stocks. However, the POST array design was intended to be a pilot array at a time when a very limited range of acoustic tags existed, the possible questions that could be addressed and the performance of this array were unclear. There are now 13 different types of programmable VEMCO acoustic tags and experience has shown that the array design for one specific species of fish will not necessarily be suitable for another species that exhibits a different behavior and migration pattern, or for which different scientific questions are being addressed.

Kintama has subsequently developed a 2^nd generation array design – our Sentinel^TM Array – that provides the optimal approach for precisely and accurately measuring the movement and survival of free-ranging marine and migratory animals across continental shelves world-wide. Study designs based on the Sentinel^TM Array maximize both the statistical precision of the survival estimates, and the yield of biological information, by identifying the lowest cost array design. In turn this array design minimizes the number of receivers and tags needed by optimizing the array geometry and tag programming, overall equipment and tag costs.