Chums Unaffected By Coho-killing Stormwater: WSU Researchers
Chums are the Dr. Johnny Fever of Puget Sound salmon, it turns out.
Give them toxic street runoff to swim in and they’re just fine.
Pour the same brew for their cousins, and coho are done — like Venus Flytrap in that one episode of WKRP in Cincinnati in which the two disk jockeys have differing reactions to drink.
That’s kinda, sorta the gist of a preliminary conclusion drawn by researchers who’ve been looking into the effects of stormwater on salmon in our region.
“The coho? Leading up to their deaths, they grew lethargic and seemed confused, swimming erratically near the water’s surface and turning onto their sides,” Jen McIntyre, a Washington State University aquatic toxicologist based in Puyallup, explained in a press release out this week. “The chums? They remained healthy-looking and alert. Even their blood chemistry was relatively unaffected.”
How are chums able to cope with the “toxic cocktail” of oil and other engine lubricants, metal shavings, brake dust, hubcaps, busted bumpers, etc., flowing downstream while coho can’t?
Damn good question, but it may have something to do, to use McIntyre’s words, with their “zombie monster fish” genetics.
And understanding the biology of chums may help out other stocks, which is something of a pretty pressing concern these days in Pugetropolis.
Despite the tens of millions of dollars being spent to restore salmon habitat (and some of us putting in rain gardens to trap runoff), about the only populations that are doing any good these days are chums and pinks.
They happen to spend the least amount of time here, and while they’re great fun to catch, they’re not quite as iconic nor as valuable as Chinook, coho and sockeye.
McIntyre says it’s worth looking into how chum are buffered from pollution, and she wants to know whether the other salmon stocks are more like coho or chums.
It’s a key question.
“If other Pacific salmonids are more like coho, their survival rates could be severely challenged as humans continue to expand into salmon’s native range,” she posits.
Solve this question and, heck, next we can figure out how to make turkeys fly.*
* Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that wild turkeys can fly, just trying to tie it all back to WKRP
Originally published at nwsportsmanmag.com on August 18, 2016.
