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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060814/...almon_barcodes

Genetic testing to help anglers, fish By JEFF BARNARD, Associated Press Writer
Mon Aug 14, 7:44 PM ET

The last time Scott Boley came home from salmon fishing, he had 17 fish to show for three days of work.

"That's pretty skimpy fishing," said Boley, the skipper of a salmon troller, a partner in the Fishermen Direct Seafood market and a member of the federal panel that sets ocean salmon fishing seasons.

But Boley hopes those fish and barcodes tied to their jaws represent a better future for Oregon and California salmon fishermen, who saw their catch cut by nearly 90 percent this summer to protect dwindling returns of wild chinook to California's Klamath River.

As part of a pilot program funded by the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, Boley and other trollers are clipping a piece of pectoral fin from each fish they catch and sending it to the Hatfield Marine Science Center for DNA testing that shows within 48 hours what river basin it came from.

Using a Global Positioning System receiver, they log into a computer the latitude and longitude of each fish, plus their names, the date, the water temperature and the depth at which the fish was caught.

Then they tie onto each fish a metal tag carrying a barcode, which can be used in the future to access that information from a Web site.

Scientists and fishermen hope the genetic testing and unprecedented detail on where salmon swim will help fisheries managers keep the commercial salmon fleet fishing while protecting struggling runs like the Klamath's wild chinook.

Canada already uses overnight genetic testing to increase the salmon harvest off the coast of British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands while protecting weak stocks on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

For the past four years, boats from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans have gone out the week before the season opens to check fish DNA. If too many fish from weak stocks show up, fishermen wait or go somewhere else. During the season, fish landed on shore are checked to make sure not too many weak stocks are being taken.

Queen Charlottes fishermen are now landing an extra $17 million worth of salmon a year, said Terry Beacham, research scientist with the department's Pacific Biological Station. Meanwhile, the harm to the weak stocks from Vancouver Island is less.

The Oregon program grew out of research Oregon State University salmon geneticist Michael Banks started in 1994 to distinguish the winter run of chinook from California's Sacramento River from other runs.

In recent years, a network of labs has developed a salmon genetic database that covers 120 watersheds from Alaska to California.

Using 13 different genetic markers on the salmon genome, known as microsatellites, researchers can spot the native river basin of an individual fish with 95 percent certainty, Banks said. Using 16 microsatellites, they can distinguish between the winter, spring and fall runs of chinook from California's Sacramento River.

Testing of fish caught off Newport in June showed they came from rivers from British Columbia to California, with more than half from the Sacramento, and very few from the Klamath, Banks said. By the end of salmon fishing this fall, he hopes to sample 2,000 fish.

Gil Sylvia, superintendent of the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station, hopes the genetic testing and barcodes will boost marketing opportunities for fishermen and guard against farm-raised salmon being sold as wild-caught salmon.

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On the Net:

Cooperative Research on Oregon Ocean Salmon: http://www.projectCROOS.com