Forage Fish Feature – Winter 2024/2025

Have you wondered what happens at Project Watershed in the winter? Plants may go dormant at this time of year, but Pacific sand lance are busy spawning – and that means our 4-person forage fish team and 32 community volunteers are also busy!

Project Watershed has been collecting information on Pacific sand lance and surf smelt since 2019, as part of our Forage Fish Project. We’re also starting to collect information about herring.

Forage fish are an integral part of marine predator diets, but we don’t know much about their habitat and population size.

Our project addresses this knowledge gap and supports restoration by identifying and mapping forage fish habitat in the northern Salish Sea and West Coast of Vancouver Island in partnership with other groups and First Nations.

Winter 2024/2025 Highlights

Since November, we’ve been out in the rain and wind, navigating high tides and short days, to collect sand samples at beaches in the Comox Valley and Campbell River area, including on Hornby Island. After collecting samples, we sieve and vortex the sand, and search for forage fish eggs using a microscope. Here are some highlights from our work this winter:

• 32 dedicated volunteers supported Pacific sand lance sampling
• We collected 64 samples at 28 beach location
• Eggs were found at 12 of these locations
• The highest egg count was at Goose Spit; we found 100+ eggs in just 15 tsp of sand!
• There were also high egg counts at Curtis Beach
• We celebrated the first Surf Smelt Day on October 25
• North Island College volunteers developed a technique for adding red dye to the eggs to make it easier to find them under a microscope
• We trained 62 people from government, environmental organisations, and First Nations

What’s happening next?

Surf smelt sampling season is just around the corner – we’ll be sampling twice a month with volunteers from May to September.

Surf smelt spawn in similar areas to Pacific sand lance but prefer slightly larger gravel. So far, we haven’t positively identified any eggs in our local area – if you want to help us keep looking, we’ll post volunteer dates and sign-up forms to our website and social media platforms in April.

Near the end of April, we’ll also be participating in the annual Forage Fish Symposium, a virtual event put on by the Coastal Forage Fish Network (CFFN). Anyone can attend the symposium; to receive registration information, sign up for our newsletter.

Other goals for this year include rebuilding the Quadra Island Forage Fish Team, increasing digital data entry for beach surveys, and developing a Herring Beach Walk Program to record herring spawn.

We hope the Herring Program will be ready by next February and will help us understand the size and extent of the herring population. For now, we are encouraging any and all beach walkers to submit sightings to iNaturalist.