Examining Salmon Diets

Hi! My name is Livvy Eickerman. I am a senior Environmental Studies–Biology combined major, and I am currently working with NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Within my project, I am opening stomachs of juvenile salmon and recording the contents of their stomachs. This project is part of a baseline study for an experiment in the Olympic Experimental Forest System, OESF. The project is called the T3 experiment and will assess different logging’s methods impact on the health of juvenile fish, assessed through change in diet.

A day in the life at work entails going to my lab bench and usually listening to a podcast and diving in. For each stomach, I take the identifying label out of the vial, re-record it on a piece of rite-in-rain paper, put that in a different, smaller vial, and then place the stomach and ethanol in a petri dish. I open up the stomach with a scalpel and take out the contents—often partially digested. I then look through the dissecting scope and sort through the contents. I look for organisms with identifiable head capsules. To ensure repeatability, the presence of a head capsule is important in my research since we want to be confident in identification. I then record what I see in my notebook, place the identified organisms in the smaller vial, make sure the organisms are covered with ethanol, and then move on to the next stomach.

Moving forward, I will work towards analyzing patterns in this data. I will compare diet contents to fish size, water temperature, presence of trees and other factors. I will then turn it into a report with the help of my supervisor at NOAA. This will hopefully create an accurate set of data that represents the health of salmon in this watershed pre-logging. This project, while it can feel dull and repetitive in the day-to-day in the lab, feels important to me when I zoom out to look at it in a larger context. When I zoom out, I’m able to realize that this work is situating the health of salmon—an ecologically and culturally important species—in a moment of time. When facing forwards towards the impacts of climate change, data like this is what many scientists turn to in order to see how current health compares to health of populations under stressful situations.

Salmon are an important species. All are, but salmon in particular are a critical part in our ecosystems. They are extremely important culturally to many Indigenous nations in the Pacific Northwest. If we can do anything to help their populations, even if it has to be under the parameter of increased human impact, it feels like important work.