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WCA releases 187,000 chinook

The project West Coast Aquatic is undertaking increases chinook salmon survival rates significantly.
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West Coast Aquatic employees and volunteers release the salmon from their pen at Centennial Pier the morning of Monday

West Coast Aquatic released 187,000 chinook salmon from their chinook net pen project on Monday morning, project manager Sheena Falconer said.

“We’ve been doing it for three years,” Falconer said.

“When you do this type of project you increase survivals by sometimes as much as four per cent which is pretty high for this.”

With a smaller pen, WCA released 10,000 salmon the first year but were able to upgrade their pen thanks to various donors to release 100,000 the second year.

“At that point we started code-wire tagging the fish so that we can determine the success of this particular project,” she said.

“This year we had 187,000 fish and we held them for two-and-a-half weeks and released them.”

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