Comparing the survival rate of juvenile Chinook salmon migrating through hydropower systems using injectable and surgical acoustic transmitters.

Acoustic telemetry is one of the primary technologies for studying the behavior and survival of fishes throughout the world. The size and performance of the transmitter are key limiting factors. The newly developed injectable transmitter is the first acoustic transmitter that can be implanted via injection instead of surgery. A two-part field study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the injectable transmitter and its effect on the survival of implanted fish. The injectable transmitter performed well and similarly to the proceeding generation of commercially-available JSATS transmitters tested concurrently. Snake River subyearling Chinook salmon smolts implanted with the injectable transmitter had a higher survival probability from release to each of eleven downstream detection arrays, because reach-specific survival estimates were significantly higher for the injectable group in three of the eleven reaches examined. Overall, the injectable group had a 0.263 (SE = 0.017) survival probability over the entire 500 km study area compared to 0.199 (0.012) for the surgically implanted group. The reduction in size and ability to implant the new transmitter via injection has reduced the tag or tagging effect bias associated with studying small fishes. The information gathered with this new technology is helping to evaluate the impacts of dams on fishes.

A fast and accurate decoder for underwater acoustic telemetry.

The Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System, developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Portland District, has been used to monitor the survival of juvenile salmonids passing through hydroelectric facilities in the Federal Columbia River Power System. Cabled hydrophone arrays deployed at dams receive coded transmissions sent from acoustic transmitters implanted in fish. The signals' time of arrival on different hydrophones is used to track fish in 3D. In this article, a new algorithm that decodes the received transmissions is described and the results are compared to results for the previous decoding algorithm. In a laboratory environment, the new decoder was able to decode signals with lower signal strength than the previous decoder, effectively increasing decoding efficiency and range. In field testing, the new algorithm decoded significantly more signals than the previous decoder and three-dimensional tracking experiments showed that the new decoder's time-of-arrival estimates were accurate. At multiple distances from hydrophones, the new algorithm tracked more points more accurately than the previous decoder. The new algorithm was also more than 10 times faster, which is critical for real-time applications on an embedded system.