when this project started , an eighth
grade teacher approached me and we came
up with the idea for the project
because none of the local um
organizations , We're going to study
what happened after the restoration
kill us at harbor restoration project
was basically taking the causeway That
was originally put in in 1942 to
Connect Indian Island and Marry Stone
Island . But what that did is
effectively blocked the title
connection between killers at harbor
and puget sound . So fish
passage , title , exchange nutrients ,
dissolved oxygen issues . All of the
above with this new project , they
built the bridge that allows the title
connection to reconnect basically the
puget sound been beach savings since
2015 to try to document changes in the
fish assemblage that might occur in the
near shore along here . And we've been
using eighth graders as our primary
data collectors . This is how the
process goes . We set the net . Um
We're corralling all the fish in the
near shore , we bring them in , we
spill them into a large live well and
then we divide these fish up for the
kids into buckets . Um They are sitting
with an expert who knows the fish
species from the region and that person
is helping them I . D . Each species
and they're taking a length from a sub
sample about 12-16 fish . They're
getting a length on . So we can also
see if there's a change in size over
time after the restoration . The main
thing is important to demonstrate that
the restoration actually affected
change in the near shore in the past
five years before the restoration
occurred , we caught one chinook salmon
a couple coho , I think five
chum and a couple of pinks in five
years . Last year , in the first year
that the cut was open , we captured 160
chum salmon and this year we just
caught way more chum and pink than
we've ever seen . These are South puget
Sound , Central puget sound and hood
canal salmon stocks . So by increasing
their survival , that means future
generations of salmon and the stocks
will will regrow . It's great for the
southern resident killer whale because
they depend on salmon that's there
staple . And with more salmon there's
gonna be more killer
whales .