All Chinook salmon raised in the Whitehorse Rapids Fish Hatchery are tagged with a coded wire tag before they are released. On average, this is about 150,000 juvenile fish per year. Though the coded wire tag itself is very small, these fish can be identified by their clipped adipose fin; facilitating submission of its head to agencies such that the coded wire tag can be read and the fish can be identified.
The application of coded wire tags to these fish has been going on since the early 1980s and represents a rich and consistent source of data to understand movement, survival, and the proportion of a stock that is caught in fisheries. However, to get robust estimates of these important variables, recoveries of tagged fish need to be co-ordinated, encouraged and analyzed.
The purpose of this project is to identify, collate, and report on all historic recoveries of coded wire tags from Canadian-origin Yukon River Chinook salmon. It will also have an outreach component, to increase the submission of coded wire tags that are recovered in fisheries in the Yukon and Alaska so that more information can be obtained from the tags.