The Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies

Hi, my name is Jaehyoung, and I am a rising junior at Cornell University majoring in Biological Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. This summer, I had the privilege of working alongside Daniel Schindler, Jackie Carter, and Chris Boatright with the University of Washington’s Alaska Salmon Program through the CICOES REU program.

My internship mainly consisted of routine sockeye salmon surveys in the streams and lakes of the Wood River system in Bristol Bay, Alaska, contributing to an 80-year dataset. Field surveys included limnology sampling, beach seining for juvenile sockeye and their competitors, smolt fyke net sampling, counting spawning salmon, and collecting otoliths from carcasses. Regular lab work involved measuring fish, collecting genetic samples, and identifying and enumerating zooplankton.

I also had the chance to develop my own independent project. I was interested in the relationship between out-migrating smolt length and returning adult numbers in the Wood River system. I determined the representative, baseline smolt length for each out-migration year and correlated those lengths with the respective adult return numbers. I found that smaller smolts result in higher return numbers, and this relationship strengthens with the number of years spent at sea before returning to freshwater. This could be a great addition to current sockeye salmon run forecasting models, as it allows for forecasting two to three years into the future. Accurate forecasting is crucial because sockeye salmon provide essential ecosystem services and support vital fisheries that regularly harvest half or more of the run each year.

Project Introduction

Research Poster