Survive the sound returns as fall salmon migration begins

Welcome back into Seattle News Today. Matthew Smith hanging out with you guys today. Right now we're looking at some of the research that goes on with salmon here in our own backyard. And this is a good time to be talking about salmon because once again we are in the middle of a Survive the Sound event. And I say Survive the Sound event because it's a little bit different this time around. I'll be honest with you folks. I've done many conversations with folks over at Long Live the Kings that put on the Survive the Sound event. But I had never heard about a fall event. And so lo and behold, I was not alone. Turns out that this is the first year we're doing such an event. So I want to bring in the expert, Scott Jenkins with Long Live the Kings. He's joining us now via Zoom. Scott, first and foremost, I wanted to say welcome in and thanks for being with us today. Thank you so much for having us. It's a pleasure to be here. So I will admit that sometimes when I have these conversations, I am so familiar with the program. I'm so familiar with what you guys are doing that that i worry that people are like what in the world are you talking about matt so i just kind of want to kick things off by uh yes this is the first time we're doing a fall migration event for survive the sound but do you want to just kind of give us the overall arching idea of what in the heck survive the sound is about absolutely so survive the sound is uh our way of communicating what's going on with salmon to the public and i guess for a little bit more background our organization is called along Live the Kings we're a local salmon recovery non-profit located here in seattle and survive the sound is the way we take our real world research following these fish as they migrate to and from the ocean now and presenting it in a fun and engaging way for people to get involved you get to pick your favorite fish it's a little bit fantasy football for fish uh for some teams and learn about salmon as you play and i know just a few days ago we were talking about salmon returning to Issaquah so it's kind of top of mind for a lot of folks right now but what i love about this that you guys do is it's not just the folks that are watching us a lot of kids in the classroom get an opportunity to learn a little bit more about this uh you know the educational side of this kind of encourages me because let's be honest a lot of folks don't always know what's going on in their own backyard the next generation is the one that can learn a lot more about this the importance of salmon i mean obviously you're with long live the kings this is a uphill battle that you all have been a part of trying to fight for the good guy side trying to make sure the salmon are still around for the next generation how hard uh is it as far as the outlook for salmon right now uh salmon are always struggling it is very dependent on the time the individual run the populations of fish some are doing very well others not so much for this fall migration that we're running right now it's actually tracking a group of adult chum salmon returning to primarily the Hood Canal area. The fall chum in Hood Canal are actually doing fairly well, returning in good numbers. The similar populations that returned slightly earlier in the summer are not doing well. They're threatened under the Endangered Species Act. So it does very much depend on the individual populations, but we're doing what we can for all of them. For our viewers at home, before we get too deep into this, I do want to share with them what the website looks like because you can get involved and this is kind of gamified right like we get an opportunity to actually jump on survivethesound.org we get to pick a fish we get to kind of track it through how does the game itself work scott uh so it's incredibly simple and straightforward as you can see right here we've got the the home page you visit it survivethesound.org uh right now you get to see these 10 fall themed fish highlighting some of our favorite uh fall specialties from Washington and beyond uh you pick your fish you can create a free account uh all you need to do if you are an adult just enter your email uh for children it creates an automatic account using just an auto-generated name and then you get to check back in all throughout the week and as long as your fish stays alive it'll keep swimming keep moving a little bit closer to its destination to the finish line which in this case is the mouth of the river where it can then head up and complete its spawning journey now i will say um i was a little i was a little uh apprehensive there for a second asked me my age and i and and i had to actually scroll and i put my real age in there and i and i didn't want to interrupt you because you were on a roll trying to explain the game i was like oh oh scott i just realized i told everybody my age on live tv um this is really cool i i like it because it's one of those things that you can do it young or old you can enjoy this now you mentioned typically we're going the reverse directions so it's the salmon working their way out towards the ocean this time they're coming back i it probably sounds silly because you guys are so immersed in this but the salmon returning the importance of this this finishes up their life cycle but what does that really mean so i like to think of spawning salmon the adults when they return back to fresh water to spawn uh the most important thing to know is that they die when that happens salmon spawn and that's it they will die within a few days and that can seem like a very sad and difficult thing to think about but it's actually an incredibly beneficial thing for our ecosystem these fish are basically a delivery system that takes energy and nutrients from the ocean and brings it upstream to our rivers to our forests so anytime you go out for a hike in the winter and you see the lush green ecosystem that we have that is because of salmon uh so we've got these fish to thank for pretty much everything we enjoy here in western washington that is such a great way to put it and i'll be honest god i've i've covered this event many times why i set you up because i just felt like i wasn't going to be able to do it justice because salmon i mean you can talk about it from a historical and cultural perspective uh what what salmon mean to the tribes you can talk about it from an impact of climate concerns and what we're dealing with that uphill battle to keep our rivers cold and fresh water but at the end of the day like uh i think that there's this overarching thing that is these salmon just represent this place this time and uh if they disappear man uh there there's gonna be a lot of hurt in the area and i don't know why i'm telling you because frankly i imagine that that this means something special to you why else would you be in this so like personally i'm just curious like salmon keeping them alive that this this idea of shining a bright light on them what does this event mean to you when you get the feedback of people being like hey i didn't know this i didn't know that because i'm sure you guys get a lot of positive feedback on this yeah i mean that's a really great question what it really is all about is building a way for people to connect with this incredibly important part of our environment salmon are a keystone species here They are at the heart of almost everything that happens in our ecosystem. So that's what Survive the Sound is all about. It takes a complicated scientific problem that people might not be familiar with, and it packages up in a way that lets you pick your favorite of these cute fish, build some empathy, and especially for this fall run, give folks an opportunity to get outside and see this in person. So if you play the game this week, you can see on the map, their locations marked of all the places throughout our region where you could go and see these fish running and moving in real life the Ballard Locks, the Squire Creek Hatchery, Carkeek Park we are surrounded by places where you can be there yourself and engage with salmon in the real world now i know we've got the website up um i i think i said it once but i just want to give you a second to a plug this website so folks can find this and get involved but also uh any additional information because frankly scott there's a it's a simple game but also there's a lot to it so is there anything else that we should know about if we're heading on over to the website uh well the first thing is you'll learn just by playing you can keep it as simple as possible pick your fish watch its migration and learn to see what is happening to these fish in the real world because they're all based on actual fish we assign them these cute characters but all of them come from real fish that we tracked and studied as they migrated and even beyond that we've got a whole huge growing suite of free educational resources so teachers families at home there's all different kinds of ways that you can keep learning about salmon as you play now i i will ask you one more question i want to sneak one more in here because i you piqued my interest you you mentioned that these are real fish real data that's the thing that i think always kind of like blows folks mind how do you make sure that the data matches up are these fish that you guys have like tracked already or are we literally tracking in real time because i'll be honest i i'm even a little confused about that i just want to make sure because i think people are probably fascinated by how you do this sure yeah so that is a common misconception this isn't a live tracking event this is using uh data from studies that were completed in recent years so in this case we're using fish that were part of a study completed i believe in the fall of 2022 and 2023 but as we go through the scientific process we have to collect the data analyze it put it together figure out what kind of stories it's telling us uh and we that is what we're using as the basis for these fish that you track and survive the sound uh right now on our screen for our viewers at home uh survived the sound i i picked a fish i went with the 12th fin since we were just talking about the Seahawks a little bit ago and uh we're we're told that the 12th fin is still alive so uh kudos to those who who selected the 12th fin uh in ninth place but you know uh honestly sometimes these things get spurts scott i've i've i've gone from worst to first a few years uh although that is in the reverse direction so it's a new year i'll learn along the way uh hey thanks for joining us today i really appreciate you walking us through all this thank you so much absolutely thank you for having us scott jenkins with long live the kings uh we appreciate the work that they're doing