Sign me up, but prepare to pony up. We conducted an acoustic tagging study on bull trout (dollies) in the Snohomish River and Central Puget Sound nearshore over the past couple of years. The hardware costs are high--the acoustic tags we used cost any where from $300 to $800 a piece and the acoustic hydrophones cost about $1,000 each. For adult salmon at the beginning of their spawning runs as they enter Puget Sound you probably would have to go with the larger pricier tags as well, since you can detect them at greater depths.

For short term studies (like spawners), you could get away with stuffing them down their gullets, but for longer term studies, such as for blackmouth, you would have to surgically implant them. Thats what we did with the bull trout; post surgery survival was very very high.

Another, possibly cheaper way to track fish would be to collect creel survey data from past/present fishing seasons and map them using GIS. Don't know what kind of historical creel survey data is out there, but it may have been done from time to time over the years--enough to provide some info if its all mapped.

Like all electronic stuff, the costs are coming down with better tech and demand. Folks are tracking tuna migrations using sattelites now. Biologists are hitching rides with the charter boats and tagging fish that are released. With a fish the size of a tuna, its possible to put a large, high output tag that can be tracked via sattelite. Its my hope within the next 10-20 years or so we can track salmon stocks in the open ocean using sattelites. Then we can begin to get a handle on that elusive variable called "ocean conditions."