Something Fishy Is Going On! What Local Chinook Salmon Diet Is Revealing About Forage Fish Populations

Forage fish (small schooling fish) are very important to the Salish Sea Ecosystem. Because they are so important, there is high interest in knowing, and monitoring, the health of these populations.  However, studying their populations, and understanding changes to them, can be very challenging. One way to go about this is to instead study the diet of generalist predators, in which their diet can be correlated to the abundance of different prey (and hence can be used to detect changes in the prey species). University of Victoria graduate student, Wesley Greentree, joins us on this episode to explain how his latest research involving examining British Columbia Chinook salmon stomach contents is helping to assess forage fish populations.