no, it's a…fish?
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks
The sixth year of the Missouri-Yellowstone Adopt-A-Fish Program officially gets underway this week. Each year, the program is gaining popularity.
We've not only had schools throughout Montana and the Dakotas, but schools from Arizona, Wyoming, Missouri, Wisconsin and Virginia have been involved.
To keep up with our growing clientele, we've expanded our study area to Billings and included some other native river species. We will still be tracking blue suckers, paddlefish, pallid sturgeon , shovelnose sturgeon, burbot, and channel catfish but this year we're adding sauger, spiny softshell turtles, and … pelicans?
Here's the story on that one.
It's always interesting to sit down at the computer at the end of the field season each year to see just what all the data we collected means. Our primary goals are linking different movements of fish with temperatures and flows and locating spawning areas and other preferred habitats throughout the season.
However, it's also interesting to look at some individual behavior of some of these fish. We have seen individual fish that make the same migration to the very same spot year after year, some that don't move out of one particular hole for the life of the transmitter, a blue sucker that traveled over a 1,000 miles in a year and returned to the same area where it was ing spring, but there was just something a little fishy about a shovelnose sturgeon swimming over a hundred river miles in just a few hours.
I distinctly remember one tracking run last spring when we just could not get out of range of detecting this particular sturgeon, miles and miles down river we went, still picking up this individual on our antennas. Sometimes, you can hear the fish "beeping" for quite a distance but this one was different.
We frequently see flocks of pelicans while we're on the river so I didn't think anything of it, at the time. Well, that was the last time we heard ol' code 11, who knows where he ended up? After looking at our ground-based telemetry station data, there it was, up the Milk River about noon, Wolf Point around 1:00, Culbertson about 3:00. Now that's moving.
As it turns out, this fish was air born and we just happened to be in the same area as the bird that ate it and took it away from us that day. This may be a little more common than we were aware of. For example, a couple years ago, researchers doing an American white pelican study in the Medicine Lake area found one of our transmitters in a pelican nesting site from a sauger that was residing in the Yellowstone River. It sure didn't swim there.
The battery life in these transmitters is about three to five years. It is interesting how many are found for only a year or so and their last location was "downstream bald eagles nest" or "upstream osprey nest". Fortunately, we have several hundred others to choose from. Hopefully the fish we've selected for adoption will make it through another year.
Now it's time for us to move away from the computers and time to move into our other office - an 18-foot jet boat so we can update classrooms and anyone else that wants to follow the weekly movements of our fish and turtles.
To learn more about Missouri-Yellowstone Adopt-A-Fish and follow radio-implanted fish and turtles, just go to www.pikemasters.com and click on the Adopt-A-Fish link. Teachers can sign up their classes for the program, name their two adopted fish and join in on the fun.
Dave Fuller is a fisheries biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks stationed at Fort Peck.