Fish school – UVic researchers share an ocean of findings
November 04, 2024
Most of the time, life under water is invisible and inaudible to us land-dwellers. Researchers at the ·¬ÇÑÉçÇø have long played a key role in helping the rest of us see, hear and understand what’s going on with the marine and aquatic creatures that share the planet with us. That knowledge includes details about the daily lives of undersea animals and importantly, about human activities that are destructive to healthy and thriving ecosystems.
Twenty years ago, Biology professor Francis Juanes began using hydrophones to capture sounds underwater and video cameras to identify which animals were making which noises.
“Humans don’t hear very well under water,” Juanes says, “so we thought the oceans were silent. They’re not. They’re full of sounds.”
Community engagement
Juanes’s research is uncovering the effects on fish populations of increasing human-caused noise like shipping. He was the only academic invited to be part of a panel organized by Canada’s national department of Fisheries and Oceans and Transport Canada to develop innovative approaches to addressing underwater noise impacts at a January 2024 Salish Sea symposium in Vancouver, BC.
The invitation didn’t come out of the blue.
Juanes’s team meets with fisher groups every few months to update them on the Adult Salmon Diet Program, which has been running since 2017. As of October 2023, the project had processed 5,000 salmon stomachs collected by recreational anglers on Canada’s west coast. Juanes and his team also meet with Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientists regularly to share results and research plans. And they engage with members of the public at various forums, with students in the classroom, and with the public at large as part of the free FishSounds Educate program which, in a little over a year beginning in January 2023, conducted 58 outreach events with over 2,400 participants.
Combining education with outreach
As well, Juanes has established a partnership with the Ha’oom Fisheries Society, which since 2020 has worked strategically to establish a prosperous, diverse and sustainable fishing culture that integrates new methodologies with traditional knowledge among five Nuu’chah’nulth First Nations on Canada’s west coast.
When Ha’oom held an online celebration sharing the , presenters included Juanes’s graduate students Darienne Lancaster and Mack Bartlett, as well as Jared Dick, a graduate student of Environmental Studies professor Natalie Ban.
Like Juanes and other UVic scholars, Ban works closely with community groups and non-governmental organizations on marine conservation and coastal ecosystems.
In February 2023, Ban was a panelist for, among other talks, "Social Equity and Marine Conservation” at the fifth annual International Marine Protected Area Congress in Vancouver, Canada. Later that year, she gave several presentations to members of Australia’s Centre for Marine Socioecology (CMS), a collaboration between the University of Tasmania and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. For example, she shared her expertise on transdisciplinary research at the CMS’s annual spring school for people studying or working in law, art, social sciences, oceanography, socioecology and health.
More locally, with the Galiano [Island] Conservancy Association in Canada, Ban’s team monitored illegal fishing in nearby conservation areas. With regular and ongoing public outreach over several years, the illegal fishing dropped significantly.
Ebbs and flows of illegal or destructive fishing
“Initially, it was a really promising and good news story where it seemed like compliance was improving,” Ban said in a 2023 Narwhal article. But in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic scuttled regular activities, suspected illegal fishing rose dramatically.
By 2023, after public venues once again provided opportunities for Ban’s and others’ education and engagement, the rate of illegal fishing started to go down again.
Ban’s group was particularly concerned about rockfish, which are vulnerable to overfishing, and can sustain severe physical damage even when released. In this situation, the concern is about destructive fishing practice as much as illegality or overfishing.
Ban, Juanes and their teams of research associates and students are only some of UVic’s researchers actively addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14: Life under water with their timely research and community engagement. By connecting with new generations of fishers and with First Nations integrating traditional knowledge and practices with new data and global connections, they are giving all of us a new view below the waves.
Rachel Goldsworthy
Photo: Jake Dingwall: School of herring in Georgia Strait