Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Last April, Cortes Island became part of an international monitoring project for Dungeness crab larvae. There were 20 light trap stations stations in the Salish Sea and 17 in the Puget Sound. Three of these traps were within our listening area. Surge Narrows School had a trap on Read Island. The Hakai Institute and Quadra Island community had another on Quadra Island. Kate Maddigan and Mike Moore coordinated volunteers looking after the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) trap in Cortes Bay.
“Hakai and the Pacific Northwest Crab Monitoring Group are working in concert with each other to provide data as to what is happening to the larval Dungeons Crab populations. It's been happening in Puget Sound for a few years. They have about five years of data down. Dungeness Crab fishing is one of the most lucrative and important crab fisheries on the coast. Catches have been diminishing, this is an effort to find out why,” explained Moore.
He added that the first phase of this project came to an end in August.
“Our Cortes Bay trap had very promising results to start with, then the warm fresh water layer moved in. That warm fresh water layer is what makes Desolation Sound so famous and warm for swimming in, but it doesn't support marine life very well. In fact, if you jump into the water, in say July, and swim down sometimes 7 meters that's where you're going to find the moon jelly fish. They're not up in the warm, fresh water. Our trap that floats at the surface was encapsulated by this warm fresh water and our results really diminished.”
They only caught a handful of ‘statistically valuable’ megalope (the stage the young Dungeness Crabs become recognizable as crabs).
“The day we caught the most didn't count. We had pulled the trap, I'd taken off the bottom and emptied it into our container to count. We're looking at the Pipefish and the big Polychaete Worms and all that sort of thing, looking for crab larva,” said Moore
“We didn't find any and then (my son) Fergus Walker, who was with me that day, goes, ‘What's that?’ and I look on the outside of the trap and we counted, I think it was 44 Dungeness Crab megalope. Those are the first ones we caught, but they didn't count because they weren't inside the trap. It's not statistically significant because it weren't inside the trap, but for us it was pretty significant.”
According to the Light Trap Station map, on Hakai’s Sentinels of Change website, 11 Dungeness Crab megalope were caught on Quadra, 20 on Read and 74 on Cortes Island.
The teams posted pictures of other larvae they captured on the Hakai website.
