"Sustaining Salmon: Fishermen, Scientists, and Project CROOS" (2011)

Located at Oregon’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, Project CROOS is a unique collaborative effort between fishermen and scientists to sustain Chinook salmon populations and the commercial salmon industry.

Salmon fisheries are now managed to protect “weak” stocks. If a river population, for example from the Klamath River, has numbers too low to harvest, ocean fishing can be closed for all stocks until the population rebounds.

Project CROOS is developing new methods to help fishermen harvest healthy salmon stock and avoid fishing weak stock. Fishermen catch salmon and sample fin clips for scientists to analyze DNA. Genetic information allows CROOS scientists to match an individual salmon to its river of origin, thus determining whether it comes from weak or healthy stock. With the goal of helping fishermen find healthy stock in the ocean, Project CROOS is investigating the relationship between stock distribution and ocean variables.

Project CROOS is also developing an information network (pacificfishtrax.com) where data collected by fishermen can be shared by scientists, fishermen, managers, processors, marketers, and the general public. For example, a customer can find out who caught her salmon and learn more about the salmon trolling industry.

"Saving Salmon: Bringing C. shasta Back into Balance" (2011)

C. shasta is a lethal parasite that can infect 60-90% of out-migrating juvenile salmon in the Klamath River. This documentary profiles the scientific effort to discover how to decrease parasite numbers so they do not overwhelm the fish.

“Saving Salmon” presents science in action, taking on a difficult ecological problem set in the California/Oregon Klamath River Basin. How science works is often misunderstood. We enjoy the results but are too often impatient with the process.

Oregon State University Associate Professor Jerri Bartholomew is a national leader in salmon disease research. From her discovery of the C. shasta life cycle to her current work with graduate students and associated scientists, this documentary tells the story of physically challenging, patient observation in the field, wrong turns, and stunning discoveries based on advanced genetic and ecological science, all on the road to solving the problem of C. shasta.

Curriculum: Learn Genetics to Save Salmon

This curriculum teaches how the sciences of genetics and ecology are being used to save salmon in the Pacific Northwest. The curriculum is centered on two important Oregon research projects: Project CROOS at the Hatfield Marine Science Center (Unit 3) and Jerri Bartholomew’s work, at Oregon State University, to solve the problem of a lethal salmon parasite (Unit 5). Documentaries of these two research projects present science in action, showing how scientists are approaching complex ecological problems. Not all the answers have been found, and the student is presented with progress to date and invited to join the science inquiry.

Supporting units provide the social context for these two research projects: the conflict over water in the Klamath River Basin (Unit 1), background material on genetics (Unit 2) and background material on variables, research questions, the scientific method, and hypotheses (Unit 4).