Name a fish that lives in the Salish Sea. Salmon, of course. And some rockfish? And aren’t there some sharks, too?
In fact, there are 253 species that have been observed in the Salish Sea, a region that includes the Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Strait of Georgia, the San Juan Islands and the Canadian Gulf Islands. A new report documents all 253 fish, along with fabulous illustrations of some of the species.
Ted Pietsch, co-author of the report and former UW professor and curator of fishes for the Burke Museum, said the last such attempt to document all of the species was 35 years ago. The new count added 37 species and removed five that researchers couldn’t find evidence they had lived in the Salish Sea.
So, now there is an official, reliable account of the fish in the Salish Sea. But why is that important?
“If you don’t know what’s there, you can’t save it,” Pietsch said.
This inventory follows a recent inventory of the birds and mammals of the Salish Sea.
Joe Gaydos, the director and chief scientist for SeaDoc, worked on that effort. “After we finished that we said, ‘OK, the next step is really to do the fish,’” he said. “We wanted to set a baseline, we wanted to let people understand what was here and what wasn’t. And then once you do that, you can understand change over time.”
SeaDoc funded the effort to create “Fishes of the Salish Sea: A compilation and distributional analysis” through private donations.
Gaydos said that Pietsch and Orr were the ideal people to compile this report. They’d worked on tracking the fish of the Salish Sea for decades.
“We like to take a long-term perspective,” said Joe Thoron, communications director for SeaDoc. “There’s nothing quick about making a healthy Salish Sea.”
He says the report is a valuable resource.
“It’s a way to reduce the effort by a lot of different scientists, because if everybody’s keeping their own lists, you have a lot of energy going into that,” he said. “Having documents like this frees up science time and science effort for people to be able to move forward on new things rather than trying once again to prove an old thing.”
And while scientists will, of course, use the information, Gaydos thinks it will also be popular with everyone from kids who are fish geeks to divers wondering if they’ve spotted a new species.
The report is a prelude to a book that will include all 253 species, each with an illustration.
Joe Tomelleri did the illustrations for the report and is also doing them for the book.
“I’m blown away by the illustrations,” Gaydos said. “We start to forget how art can take it one level farther. … I think a lot of tattoos are going to come out of that book.”
Tattoo inspiration aside, Tomelleri’s striking illustrations show, at a glance,the huge diversity of the species.
“It’s like a photograph, only better,” Gaydos said.
Photographs, it turns out, weren’t really an option. Photographing fish is notoriously difficult. That’s actually how Tomelleri, who has been drawing fish since 1985, got started. While in graduate school studying biology and range management, he and fellow grad students created a book about fish in a creek on campus. Originally, a friend had planned to photograph the fish. They quickly learned that didn’t work well, especially with the equipment of the time.
Tomelleri told them “don’t worry about it, I’ll just draw them.”
Tomelleri had known since he was a kid that he had a skill for drawing. He just needed to find the right thing to motivate him. He’s been drawing fish ever since.
Also, he’s a fisherman.
“That helps a lot,” he said. “I wouldn’t have the passion for it if I wasn’t a fisherman.”
Tomelleri doesn’t have formal training in ichthyology — the study of fish — but he’s amassed knowledge through years of experience, reading and studying.
When possible, he prefers to collect his own specimens to draw. After collecting the fish, he photographs them immediately while the colors are fresh. Then he preserves the fish in formaldehyde or, if it’s too large, he’ll freeze it. He uses that specimen to draw the form of the fish, filling in the colors next.
Collecting the fish himself wasn’t possible with many of the fish for the Salish Sea report. For many of those drawings, he used preserved museum specimens.
Tomelleri is working to create a sort of ideal fish, a true representation of what the species looks like. Creating an illustration takes between 10 and 70 hours. “There’s always some damage on the fish, no fish is perfect. It’s my job to take that out,” he said. “A lot of times scales will be missing, or there will be splits in the fins or part of the fin may be cut off by a turtle bite or something. It’s my job to take that out and make it like the fish wasn’t damaged. We don’t want everyone to think every bass has a tail lopped off or something.”
Prior to starting on the Salish Sea project, Tomelleri had mostly worked on freshwater fish. Saltwater fish are much more of a challenge.
“In saltwater, the number of species are greater and hence the diversity of the species is greater,” he said. “In other words, there are so many different nuances in the saltwater fish.”
For instance, the kelp poacher, one of Tomelleri’s favorite fish from the Salish Sea, have long, extended fins that mimic saltwater vegetation.
Tomelleri appreciates the rockfish as well.
“All the rockfish, they’re favorites of mine,” he said. “They’re really brightly colored and they’re fun to do. I think we’ve done close to 20 and they all have unique patterns that you don’t see very often. And odd colors, like pink and green or black and yellow. They’re very striking.”
Pietsch, the report’s author, also has some particular favorites among the fish. One, the Pacific spiny lumpsucker, looks like someone designed it to be a stuffed animal. “The lumpsucker is an awfully cute little thing,” he said.
At the other end of the spectrum is the ratfish. While the lumpsucker looks as if it were designed to be turned into a plush toy, the ratfish looks like it should illustrate a scary bedtime story.
“The ratfish is such a mysterious and wonderful little thing,” Pietsch said. “They’re very abundant in the Sound, but people are really interested in it.”
Jessi Loerch: 425-339-3046; jloerch@heraldnet.com.
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