New study highlights 37 species of fish found to inhabit the Salish Sea

Published 10:40 am Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Smallhead eelpout, spotted ratfish, slimy snailfish, pricklebreast poacher; the names sound like creatures from another world. And, in a way, they are. The names represent different fish species found in the marine world of the Salish Sea.

A recent study, “Fishes of the Salish Sea: a compilation and distributional analysis,” has compiled a checklist of all 253 fish species found in the Salish Sea. Of those, 37 were previously unknown to have inhabited the area.

According to co-author Ted Pietsch, having baseline information like this is important to future goals of conservation and understanding how fish populations may change over time.

“The main goal is to appraise the public and the scientific community that there are many more things out there than we thought,” Pietsch said. “If we don’t know what’s there, we can’t tell whether things are impacted by pollution in the environment, or whatever it might be.”

Pietsch said that this is the first update of fish species in the Salish Sea in 35 years, and the study notes that the updated list recorded a 14 percent increase species than the last study.

Since publication, four more species have been added to the checklist, Pietsch said, and that they were surprised to find as many different species as they did.

A favorite of his is the opah, a type of fish that is found in the Gulf of Alaska, near Japan and off the coasts of Vancouver Island, but is rarely seen in the Salish Sea. There are only two known records from 1935 and 1995.

“The opah is a really nice, beautiful thing,” Pietsch said. “It is exteremly surprising that we found that and is quite rare in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.”

The study also features accompanying color drawings of the fish by Joe Tomelleri.

Pietsch said the strikingly detailed portraits are often mistaken for photographs. These will accompany a description of each of the 257 fish to go into a book that Pietsch and co-author Jay Orr are compiling to illustrate the diversity found in the Salish Sea.

Pietsch, professor emeritus at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, has been at the University of Washington for 37 years. He noted that the study combined research drawn from all over the Pacific Northwest including University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, Oregon State University and California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

“It’s a matter of decades-long accumulation of data,” Pietsch said. “We think this is a pretty updated and definitive record.”

The study Fishes of the Salish Sea is available for free here, along with additional drawings of fish species.

– Anna V. Smith, Journal reporter