This week marks the start of our transition between the busy summer season and upcoming winter monitoring. The team is diving headfirst into data entry, compiling everything we’ve collected over the last few months. We use this data to track year-over-year trends and visualize changes happening within our local ecosystems.

This week kicked off with many of our programs wrapping up. We are finished with the larval crab surveys and the eDNA collection for European green crab. A huge shout out to Wonbin who came almost every Friday morning, before work, to help us. 

This week kicked off with our juvenile salmon and larval crab surveys. We did not see any salmon last week, but we are still seeing many juvenile sticklebacks in both parts of the harbour. For our light trap surveys we have seen an incredible number of kelp pipefish. We still are seeing a few Dungeness megalapae in the traps as well.  Sadly, both of these surveys will be wrapping up this week.

This week kicked off with our juvenile salmon program. The salmon have mainly moved into deeper waters. There are only two more surveys left for this year.

We kicked off the week with our juvenile salmon survey where we saw three juvenile salmon at Irvines Landing. We also caught over 20 juvenile squid! We usually only see the squid once per season. We were very excited to see them again!

This week kicked off with our larval crab survey and eDNA collection. We have been seeing little larval anchovies in our trap.

This week kicked off with water quality monitoring at Anderson creek. Water levels are still very low and flows are disconnected from the estuary.

This week kicked off with sorting through juvenile threespined sticklebacks to find a Chinook salmon in the mix. We haven't seen many salmon recently but hope that we may see a few more in the coming weeks. One fish that is prevalent right now are the northern anchovies. This school went by us at Irvines Landing and then we met them again in Whiskey Slough. Have you seen them?

It has been a busy week! It kicked off with the larval crab and juvenile salmon surveys. We are now into the season of juvenile three-spined sticklebacks. The Dungeness megalopae were absent for a week but were seen again this week.

This week has been filled with exciting species. We had mentioned last week that sometimes we get adult squid in our juvenile salmon sets and on Friday, they were there! One was very active and tried to camouflage in the bucket. Check out the cool video where you can see one of them ink. In addition to Shiner perch, we had pile perch, which we only see occasionally.

This week kicked off with our larval crab and juvenile salmon surveys. We did not see any salmon in our surveys this week but we did have shiner perch and three-spined stickleback. 

The Loon Foundation, in collaboration with the shíshálh Nation and Capilano University, held a milestone event to celebrate a new phase of development of the Pacific Ocean Discovery Station (PODS).

This week kicked off with our larval crab and juvenile salmon surveys. We still saw a few Coho smolts at Irvines Landing and caught one inside the harbour on Monday. We will be moving into the juvenile threespined sticklebacks and the juvenile shiner perch soon!

This week kicked off with our ah-mazing volunteers coming out with their gardening gloves to help pull weeds and clean up the Tranquility Garden. We were able to remove some very persistent maples, clean up the spruce needles and even tackled some of the neighbouring blackberries.

This week kicked off with an incredible 618 Dungeness megalopae and one juvenile instar in our light trap. The instars are tiny little replicas of the adult crabs. Over 62,500 Dungeness megalopae have been caught so far in our network. So far this year, six traps have exceeded the previous year’s catches, including ours!

This week kicked off with us exploring the low tide at Baker Beach with the Pender Harbour High School X block class we are working with for eight weeks. We identified sea stars, learned about crab moults, and had a quick refresher on crab identification with the students.

This week kicked off with a shoreline cleanup of McNeil Lake. A group of five students and two leaders helped us collect 3.8 kgs of trash from around the lake shore. Trash included cigarette butts, fabrics, plastics and dog poop bags! An enormous thank you to the students, parents and teachers that participated as well as to EcoAction Canada for supporting us with this work.

This week kicked off with our first Dungeness crab of the season arriving in the light trap. We are so excited for their arrival. We have teamed up with the Hakai Institute Sentinels of Change program to collect samples for population genetics study. It is the second year of sampling and we hope to have the results from last year soon.

The Loon Foundation is expanding its youth environmental programming, bringing new opportunities for kids and families to explore, learn, and appreciate nature through outdoor adventure.

Last week we kicked off the week by starting our eDNA collection for European green crab DNA. We do this using the light trap that is designed to attract the larval crabs. Once we identify, record, and release the organisms in the trap, we filter the remaining water for collection. This water sample is frozen and will be sent to Fisheries and Oceans Canada at the end of the season for analysis.