Adopt-A-Fish update – April 24, 2008
below Fort Peck Dam
By RYAN LOTT
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks
FORT PECK -- "I think they got him!" That's what Dave Fuller and I were saying to each other as we watched the air bubbles coming up from Mike Ruggles' and Bill Viste's dive tanks.
It was a nice, sunny recent Saturday afternoon when most people were out doing spring yardwork or fishing somewhere. But fisheries researchers from the Fort Peck area decided to dust off their diving equipment and go for a little swim in the tailwaters of Fort Peck Dam.
Fisheries crews used to dive in this area quite frequently back in the early to mid 1990s and would come up with a variety of fish species, even the occasional pallid sturgeon.
On this day, the crew was on a mission. We knew we had a radioed pallid sturgeon in the area and we wanted to capture it because the radio it was carrying was going to run out of battery life and we wanted to implant a new radio before the fish made his big spawning run downstream. As Viste and Ruggles emerged from the depth of the "sturgeon hole," as we call it, they in fact had a pallid sturgeon in their net bag. And it was the fish we were looking for, Code 96, better known as Norman, Pinocchio, Oscar, or pallid sturgeon No. 1 from the 2004-05 Missouri-Yellowstone Adopt-A-Fish program.
This pallid sturgeon was caught in the tailrace area and implanted with its transmitter in the fall of 2003. For five years, we have collected data on this fish and he has given us some great information.
As far as we know, now this pallid is the only Fort Peck tailwaters resident pallid. For the past five years, he has always made his way back to this area to winter.
Each spring, for whatever reason, he gets the itch and starts to make his way down the Missouri River to the confluence of the Yellowstone, where he turns the corner and heads upstream to potential spawning ground where he meets up with aggregations of other males and the occasional female.
This takes place about mid-June, and from there Code 96 makes his long journey back down the Yellowstone and back up the Missouri to Fort Peck Dam. He seemed to be on a two-year cycle, meaning he would spend one whole year in his wintering area and the next year he would make his spawning run, but he has made his so-called spawning run the last two years, which changed his normal routine.
We successfully implanted Code 96 with a new radio and released him back to the tailrace area. Now we can't wait to see what he does this year and hopefully we will get him back into the program for next year to share with all of the classrooms.
Weekly updates on our radio-implanted fish can be found on the Missouri-Yellowstone Adopt-A-Fish home page with updates posted Thursday mornings in April and May. Just click on the Find your Fish button on the home page. The program is sponsored by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, The Billings Gazette, Walleyes Forever, Montana PikeMasters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Geological Survey, Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The program is free.
School classrooms, youth fishing clubs and home schoolers can sign up for the program and adopt and name two fish. Just go to the Web site and click on the How To Adopt Button or send us an e-mail at Missouri-Yellowstone Adopt-A-Fish.
Adopt-A-Fish correspondents are fisheries biologists with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. They’ll post weekly updates every Thursday throughout April and May on this site and in the Outdoors section of The Billings Gazette.