The Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System: A New Tool

Abstract

Limitations of biotelemetry technology available in 2001 prompted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Portland District to develop a new acoustic telemetry system to monitor survival of juvenile salmonids through the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. Eight years later, the Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System (JSATS) consists of microacoustic transmitters (12 mm long, 0.43 g weight in air), autonomous and cabled receiving systems, and data management and processing applications. Transmitter pulse rate can be user-defined and as configured for this case study was set at 5 seconds, with an estimated tag life of 30 days and detection range of 300 m. Before JSATS development, no technology existed to study movement and survival of fish smaller than 10 g migrating long distances from freshwater and into saltwater. In a 2008 study comparing detection probabilities, travel times, and survival of 4,140 JSATS-tagged and 48,433 passive integrated transponder (PIT)-tagged yearling Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha; mean fork length 133.9 and 135.3 mm, for JSATS and PIT-tagged fish, respectively) migrating the Snake and Columbia rivers to the Pacific, the JSATS provided survival estimates at more locations with greater precision, using less than one-tenth as many tagged fish as the traditional PIT-tag system. While designed to be optimized for juvenile salmonid survival assessment in the Columbia River basin, JSATS technology may be used in a variety of environments. Informat…