The Mission Sonar fence estimate as of Sept 7th is about 1.8 million pinks have swum past. Since Aug 31st over 100,000 pinks have swum by daily - (compare that to the Whonnock test #s); http://www.psc.org/FRPWeb/Escapement/Pink_Escapement.pdf
That is a lot of fish. Close to 1 million pinks in a week. I don't there is any other run of salmon in the river that can put so many individual fish in the river within one week and consider it's a week return.
Question is does that add up to significantly more than the 3.7 million estimate? My guess the run is more than half way competed.
To piggy back on this thought, Just out of curiosity I looked at previous Whonnock test fishery results to try and guesstimate when the mid-way point of previous runs were by adding up the total season's catch from previous runs and determining on what date the 50% percentile fish was counted. The data is somewhat flawed as it runs from mid-August to late September so early arrivers and stragglers are not counted, however making the huge assumption that ‘most’ of the runs are accounted for, we get the following dates for the midway points:
2007 7-Sep
2009 8-Sep
2011 13-Sep
2013 12-Sep
2015 4 Sep
The ‘average date’ if that term is even valid here, would be somewhere around Sept-9 so the latest hydroacoustic numbers from Sept-7 are quite possibly right around or just prior to the midway point.
Looking at it another way, by Sept-7 the previous 5 runs had seen an average of 43% of the total test fishery catch (though there is a high of 65% in 2015 to a low of 20% in 2011), so very roughly guessing that the latest hydroacoustic numbers account for ~40-50% of this year’s run would put it at ~3.6M - 4.5M.
If the hydroacoustic method is at all accurate then the DFO estimate may actually not be all that far off when all is said and done.
Hydroacoustic counting is relatively newer but unfortunately I cant find any data for previous years so I have nothing to compare with. 2015 hydroacoustic numbers would be very interesting as the test fishery was significantly lower than this years…
I’ll make the compiled data available to anyone who wants to play around with it themselves.
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Topic: Pink Run 2017 (Read 259669 times)