i was wondering if you’ve talked about how you fish at work? i see such a wide array of sizes, do you electrofish or use nets or seins or does it depend?
Thanks for asking. We do a mix of electrofishing and nets. For electrofishing we use special boats and have two technicians on the bow with long dip nets to pick up any fish we see. We are supposed to get all the fish we see the the best of our ability. Electrofishing tends to catch more smaller fish like minnows and shiners because we do it near the shore, but we can get big ones too. For nets we use a mix of hoop, fyke, and trawl nets.
For hoop nets, we use two sizes and always set them in pairs of one big and one small. Those get set in the main channel or side channels and are baited with a mesh bag full of really gross soybean byproduct. They get left for 48 hours before we pull them. We mostly get carp and catfish in hoop nets and don't get small fish like shiners because of the size of the net.
Fyke nets are used to catch fish that travel along the shore. They are set perpendicular to the shore and have a long tongue that we stake on shore. When fish are swimming along the shore, they hit the tongue and follow it into the net where they get trapped. We have two sizes of fyke nets. Small ones have a short tongue and a very small mesh size that is better at catching small fish. Big fykes have a very long tongue and their mesh is big enough to lets small fish get out and is more used to cach larger fish. Fyke nets are better in areas with low water flow like backwaters. We get a lot of diversity in fyke nets, like shiners, sunfish, catfish, gar, crappies, and turtles.
We only do trawling a few times a year. It's a big, funnel-shaped net that gets dragged on the bottom of the channel by the boat. We tend to see mostly catfish in there, but also sturgeon.
Our sampling is done under the Long-Term Resource Monitoring and Long-Term Electrofishing programs. We get a randomized set of sites for electrofishing, hoop netting, and fyke netting each year. and visit each site 3 times in the season. Trawl netting is always done in the same spot, which is right below Mississippi river lock and dam 25.
