By Ossi Turunen, Bournemouth University

Since the monitoring of the spring smolt run for Frome started in March, the SAMARCH team has been working non-stop to collect as much data on the salmon and sea trout smolts as possible. I worked with the team for the last few nights of the smolt run and even though the run wasn’t at its most eventful stage anymore, I gained a lot of new skills and information considering salmonids and their migration and how they are studied.

During my first night shift I worked with two members of the research team and in addition to the normal treatment the caught fish get, i.e., weight and length being recorded before release back to the river, fish over a certain size were also tagged with acoustic tags. The monitoring works so that when the fish swim through a canal flowing through a fluvarium, they will end up swimming through a slowly turning drum that forces the fish into a box-shaped trap. The trap is checked every 30 minutes and any salmonids found will be collected, measured and released.