helped by telemetry
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks
Radio telemetry can be useful for more than just tracking a fish to find locations for the Missouri River Adopt-A-Fish program and determining habitats that these fish prefer.
This week is a prime example. It marks the beginning of an annual event called "The Great Pallid Sturgeon Hunt." This is where researches from Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers team up to capture adult pallid sturgeon to take to the hatchery to spawn so that their young can be raised and stocked back to the wild.
Without radios, this would be a very tough task, considering there's less than 200 adults left in the entire population between Fort Peck Dam and Lake Sakakawea.
However, by using these previously tagged fish, they can lead us right to the "honey holes" where pallid sturgeon like to hang out at this time of year.
On Monday, we were searching for these hot spots, and we found a significant number of tagged pallid sturgeon at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers. On Tuesday, the hunt began. Right to the Confluence went Montana FWP's William Waller and Nathan McClenning to drift their first net. After 10 minutes of drifting the net downstream, they were retrieving the net and then performed the not-always-graceful pallid dive (this where the crew members lunge over the bow of the boat to hoist the endangered species into the boat). The pallid dive wound up with Adopt-A-Fish Pallid No. 3. Then, before too long, they recaptured Adopt-A-Fish Pallid No. 2. Both of these fish were doing very well and were released after a quick examination.
Other crews were fishing the same area, which resulted in a very successful first day of hunting (or is that fishing?). A total of eight males and two females were sent to Miles City State Fish Hatchery and Garrison National Fish Hatchery.
We hope to find some more females this week. Without our radio-implanted pallid sturgeon, we may have ended up spending a lot of time fishing where the fish were not. Too bad we can't use these same techniques during walleye tournaments.
With the cool weather, water temperatures haven't warmed very much and most of the rest of the fish in the Adopt-A-Fish program still aren't very active
To understand how we track the fish, you can go to the Internet and check on the Adopt-A-Fish pages on The study. They describe how fish are caught, implanted with radios and how we track them with floating base stations and with hand-held receivers.