Story by Mark Hume

Pacific salmon from the Keogh River in British Columbia and the Columbia River, in Oregon, will be tracked as part of a global research project that is trying to unravel the greatest mysteries of the world’s oceans.

Last fall, in Monterey, California, an international gathering of scientists launched what is expected to be a 10-year, $1-billion project that will tag and monitor thousands of different sea creatures.

The Census of Marine Life, which is being compared to the Human Genome Project or NASA’s Mars Lander exploration, because of the magnitude of the task, will gather data on everything from tiny salmon fry to blue whales.

At a conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, in December, project coordinators agreed to start tracking salmon migrating out of the two West Coast salmon rivers, both of which have been the focus of intense research.

The Census of Marine Life project will attempt to determine where young salmon go once they leave freshwater, and what “choke points” they meet as they head for the Gulf of Alaska. It has long been believed that millions, perhaps billions, of young salmon have been dying in the ocean. But biologists don’t know where the fish have been hitting the wall. Are they being eaten in the estuaries and along the shallow coastal waters in the first days and weeks after leaving rivers? Are they being killed farther north by predators or are they dying offshore, because of ocean conditions.

By tracking the salmon from the river mouth, scientists hope to be able to fill in a gaping hole in human knowledge of what is the most commercially important fish species on the West Coast. Jesse Ausubel, of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which donated $5 million to help launch the census, said the global project “will shine a giant spotlight on life in the ocean.”

Perhaps nowhere is that spotlight needed more than on the West Coast, where many salmon stocks are on the verge of extinction, with populations in free-fall despite fishing bans.

Barbara Block, Stanford marine biology professor, said at the Monterey conference that even ocean scientists remain ignorant of much of what is going on in the sea.

"I can say today we don't know how . . . most of the top predators in this ecosystem are using the ocean realm just off to our west. I'm interested in letting the organism give us the animal's eye view of what are the ocean's hot spots,” she told 70 scientists from six nations.

She said that studying the open ocean is "like going into space” because so much happens beneath the surface, in an environment where scientists have difficulty operating.

The Census of Marine Life will utilize tiny electronic tags that can be monitored by a grid system. The technology has provided some important breakthroughs in recent years.

Block and her colleagues at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, used the system to track giant bluefin tuna off the coast of New England - and discovered the fish migrate thousands of miles across the Atlantic to spawn in the Mediterranean.

Tracking tags have also been used to monitor leatherback turtles, which make a 15,000-mile return journey that goes from the California coast, to Chile, Japan and Russia.

Pacific salmon are known to travel north along the coast to the Gulf of Alaska, then they migrate out across the North Pacific towards Russia, before returning home.

The route has been traced by catch data - but the electronic tags will allow constant monitoring - which should allow scientists to find out exactly where they are going, when they move - and most importantly, when they run into trouble.