SD83 Students Swim Upstream for Careers

Nothing fishy is going on here.

Twenty-Seven students from JL Jackson, Salmon Arm, AL Fortune and Eagle River secondaries spent part of a day learning about the various career duties of certain members of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans out at Kingfisher Interpretive Centre beside the Shuswap River. Students were divided into three groups to learn at the following stations: Stock Assessment, Enforcement and Hatchery work.

With stock assessment, students learned the “Mark Recapture” system of tagging fish as a means to count them to provide estimates of the four different kinds of salmon that live in the Shuswap River: Sockeye, Coho, Chinook and Pink. Most of this work is done in the late summer and early fall when salmon return to spawn. Students had to had to cast a net with a lead line on dry land and then gather fish (represented by balls) to tag and then send back into the river. Once the fish return and some of them are dead on the shore, they use simple math to estimate the number of fish on any particular run. Finally, student had to clean up some of the dead fish from the shore.

Students also had a chance to check out the hatchery. It estimated the hatchery releases nearly 50-thousand salmon fry into the Shuswap every year. Hatchery workers gather salmon from the river, sort them by gender, get them into pens and then get the eggs and milt to prepare for incubation. Once they are mixed together, the eggs sit for a couple months at certain temperatures before they are moved to another pen or two and then released into the Shuswap river again.

When in came to enforcement, Officers Cory Morrison and Dan Kreivenko set up a habitat destruction scenario. Using an actor as a violator, one student roll played an officer and another one a note taker. From there, the students did some CIS work checking out riparian vegetation areas for violations and then documenting the evidence. That evidence was given then to a biologist acting as an expert witness to see if damage has taken place. Consequences for the violator could involve anything from a warning and/or restorative justice, to restitution and/or potential criminal conviction, fines or jail time.

Students also learned about the education needed for these positions and the volunteer and co-op opportunities that exist for the students if they wish to pursue those career pathways further. If you are interested in what else SD83 offers its students when it comes to experiential learning and career pathways, please don’t hesitate to contact Career Education Coordinator George Richard via text or phone at 778-824-1188 or email him at grichard@sd83.bc.ca.