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Boise company's high-tech gear collects data that can influence salmon policy

BY BILL ROBERTS - broberts@idahostatesman.com

Copyright: © 2010Idaho Statesman

Published: 01/07/10


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Darin Oswald / doswald@idahostatesman.com
Biomark technicians Justin Arthur, left, and Quentin Watson work on a new antenna designed to track salmon or any other fish carrying a chip. The cost of Biomark systems to track species runs from $25,000 to $75,000.

ELSEWHERE

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Should dams in the lower Snake River be breached to give Northwest salmon a better shot at thriving?

Is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' practice of carrying fish around dams as they head toward the Pacific Ocean helping them survive?

A small Boise company that quietly has been designing and deploying fish-detection systems for nearly two decades is helping answer those questions.

Biomark Inc., with about 20 employees, is busy creating systems to account for fish as they migrate. The company, at 703 Americana Blvd., also implants fish with half-inch chips that transmit data when they come within range of antennas the company installs in streams or hatcheries.

Biomark's work is helping keep track of salmon as they make their way down the Columbia River basin and back. The data help researchers understand the fish survival rate.

Government experts say Biomark's products work well and provide accurate information. The company's products are in hundreds of locations throughout the Pacific Northwest.

"Biomark is pretty good to put in an (antenna system) and make it work," said Steve Yundt, a monitoring and evaluation coordinator in salmon and steelhead with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Boise.

Biomark employees steer clear of the politics over the salmon issue.

"We feel like we are providing a tool to a research community (where) the tool matters, and it's having a positive impact," said Dean Park, Biomark's president. "People feel comfortable coming to us, knowing they are going to get an unbiased approach to their project."

SALMON CONCERNS HELP BIOMARK GROW

As interest from state and federal governments, American Indian tribes and others has intensified oversalmon in the last decade, Biomark's fortunes have increased as well.

Biomark, a private, employee-owned company, says its gross revenues have averaged a 15 percent increase annually between 2005 and 2009, blowing right through the recession that crippled or wiped out many other small businesses. The company won't disclose its actual sales. But Biomark's work with salmon accounts for about half of its business, much of it in government contracts.

Its services include selling the technology it gets from manufacturers; designing, fabricating and installing systems to capture information about wildlife species; and implanting fish and other animals with the small tags.

The company hires 40 to 60 seasonal staffers each year and anticipates adding four more people to its full-time staff in 2010.

"If we weren't dealing with the salmon issue in the Pacific Northwest, we would be a much smaller company," Park said.

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHAPED EARLY YEARS

Biomark was founded by Park's father, Donn, and another partner in 1990 in the Tri Cities area of Washington state after Donn retired from the National Marine Fisheries Service as a fisheries biologist. He bought out his partner in the mid-1990s.

The company moved to Boise in 1991. Biomark at first hoped to provide tag and tracking services for the federal government, Dean Park said. But federal officials weren't interested. They wanted Biomark's products and consulting services.

"We filled that niche, and we were able to survive in the first five years by supplying equipment and making custom application products for the government," Park said.

The company also expanded beyond fish. It has designed systems used in tracking a variety of species from sea turtles to fishers, which are small weasel-like mammals.

For the Hoopa Valley Indian tribe in California, the company designed an antenna system that captured information from tags implanted in fishers. The work helped the tribe learn more about the species, such as population size and movements, company officials say.

A WILD ROUTE FOR AN ECONOMICS MAJOR

Dean Park went to work for his father's company in 1992 after graduating from the University of Vermont with a degree in economics. The company had three employees then.

"When I graduated from school, trust me, 95 percent of the economic majors were going on to Boston and New York to work in the city for Wall Street firms or banks," he said.

But it wasn't such a stretch going from an economics degree to wildlife tracking, he said.

"I grew up camping with my parents in Bear Valley (northeast of Stanley) in the summer," he said. And he took a broad view of economics. "To me everything is economics É the salmon issue is an economic one."

Park began by building monitoring equipment and working in the field. He later became operations manager and was named president in 2000.

THE MYSTERY OF THE VANISHING FISH

But Biomark's credibility may be its most important product.

In Idaho, for example, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other groups working with salmon were seeing a significant drop a couple of years ago in the number of returning salmon bearing the tags carrying identification numbers. No one was sure why, said Yundt, the Fish and Wildlife Service monitoring coordinator.

Many of those fish were being tracked by hand, with wands that were waved over them to activate the information-bearing tags as fish entered the hatchery.

But those wands may have encountered interference - everything from nearby metals to a running motor - and missed some fish.

In April, Biomark installed an antenna in a fish hatchery on the South Fork of the Salmon River east of Riggins for about $50,000.

When the salmon returned, government officials discovered that many of the fish were being missed using the handheld technology but were detected by the hatchery-installed antenna.

"That ... detected about 100 percent of the adults that come up the ladder," Yundt said.

The missing fish were accounted for.

Biomark, Yundt said, "helped us answer that part of the question."

Bill Roberts: 377-6408

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