Forage Fish Symposium

The forage fish team has been busy inside and outside this spring. Inside, we have been planning the Spring symposium on April 17, 2024, for the Coastal Forage Fish Network (CFFN). Hosted on Zoom, the symposium brings together researchers, experts and community citizen science volunteers to share research highlights from across Vancouver Island and beyond.

We have also been working on analyzing and writing reports on our winter data. Over 700 hours of time were committed to our forage fish project by roughly 60 community science volunteers between June 2023 and March 2024. This includes sampling done on Cortes and Hornby Islands, in the Campbell River area and the Comox Valley. 

Out in the field, Jac has been collecting eDNA (environmental DNA) around the West Coast of Vancouver Island to build the intertidal habitat suitability model (HSM) for West Coast Vancouver Island. In late March Jac was also out on the Misty Lady fishing boat collecting subtidal sand samples to assist with verifying some of the past subtidal modelling that was completed between 2019 and 2022. Subtidal samples are taken by a large claw (Van Veen grab sampler). The eDNA samples will then be sent to a lab for analysis. This is where all those cold storage boxes we started collecting last year come in. To keep the integrity of the eDNA from breaking down, samples must stay close to frozen. The lab that processes samples is in Ontario. The forage fish team is very appreciative if you have any insulated boxes and ice packs for shipping samples (i.e. Good Food, Fresh Plate, Hello Fresh etc).

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