11-25-2025 Salmon Survey Update

November 28, 2025

There’s still a bunch of salmon in Carkeek Park but activity is starting to slow down and carcasses are piling up. As one of our volunteers put it “These salmon look tired”. It’s not easy to swim upstream and the carcasses we’re finding are beat up from the journey. Some are suffering from molds and fungal infections as their immune systems shut down to focus energy towards spawning. We’re expecting a couple more weeks of the salmon run in the park but it will get increasingly hard for visitors to spot them.

Survey Date	Live Chum	Dead Chum	Live Coho	Dead Coho	Live Cutthroat	Dead Cutthroat	Live Unknown	Dead Unknown
2025-10-25	0	1	0	1	0	0	0	0
2025-10-30	2	1	4	6	0	0	2	1
2025-11-01	3	2	0	1	0	0	3	0
2025-11-04	27	6	1	0	0	0	0	0
2025-11-07	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0
2025-11-08	32	13	1	1	0	0	0	0
2025-11-11	53	10	0	0	0	0	4	0
2025-11-15	183	29	0	3	0	0	0	0
2025-11-18	188	43	1	0	0	0	4	0
2025-11-22	123	78	0	1	0	0	0	0
2025-11-25	125	83	0	0	1	0	2	0

Yearly Chum Total	Chum Calc Date	Yearly Coho Total	Coho Calc Date
392	2025-11-25	13	2025-11-18

Note: yearly total = live fish + running total of dead fish. Highest total is usually but not always on the most recent survey date

The number of carcasses is trending upwards as we approach the end of the salmon run. The live numbers have dropped by around 1/3 in the past week and soon we’re expecting to see more carcasses than live fish. While our yearly totals may seem meagre when compared to some of the recent years, the 392 returning chum already exceeds our yearly totals from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2023.

Salmon have been spotted all over Piper’s Creek and Venema Creek this year. Earlier in the season they were mainly in the first couple hundred feet of Piper’s Creek but they’ve mostly been hanging out in the upper sections (past 1000ft) lately. Historically we’ve seen the majority of spawning activity happen in this part of Piper’s Creek and this year has been no different.

As usual the Chum salmon have had a much easier time spawning than the Coho. It’s been hard for us to tell what percentage of salmon have been spawning this year because we’re unable to make the determination on a large percentage of the carcasses we’ve surveyed. The next figures may give us a clue why…

Predation rates are way up this year compared to last year where only 9% of Chum salmon were predated. This has meant a lot of ripped open carcasses and organs missing which has prevented us from making a spawning success determination on a large number of the carcasses. As usual Coho have an even higher rate of predation. While each year’s predation percentage fluctuates wildly, the total number of predated Chum is fairly consistent across years. Predators will only get into so many carcasses every year so when there are fewer carcasses around more of them will get picked at.

Thanks CWCAP volunteers for gathering this data!