Adopt-A-Fish update – May 1, 2008
pallids for hatcheries
By NATE McCLENNING
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks
Spring can be an extremely busy time for fisheries crews. It's not just their own projects or following the fish for Missouri-Yellowstone Adopt-A-Fish. It's helping others with their projects, too.
Last week, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) fisheries personnel from all over eastern Montana gathered at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers to combine efforts with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service personnel to collect adult pallid sturgeon for the hatchery propagation program.
This put the Billings' Region 5 Adopt-A-Fish crew more than 300 miles away from their normal working area on the Bighorn and middle Yellowstone rivers. But, there is an especially good reason to travel those miles.
This summer, hatchery-reared juvenile pallid sturgeon are going to be stocked in the Bighorn and Yellowstone Rivers in Region 5. It is possible that pallid sturgeon historically inhabited this area. Although the lower Yellowstone has been identified to contain suitable habitat for juvenile pallid sturgeon, this study will help us identify if the habitat in this area is suitable for them, too.
It will mark the first time that pallid sturgeon have been stocked into the Yellowstone River system above Ranchers Ditch Diversion, located near Bighorn, just downriver from Custer.
A total of 100 radio-implanted juvenile pallid sturgeon will be released at two stocking locations, immediately downstream of Huntley Diversion Dam on the Yellowstone River and downstream of Two-Leggins Diversion on the Bighorn River.
The transmitters that these approximately one-third-pound juveniles will receive are going to allow us to follow them for about one year after we release them. Stocking will occur sometime in July to make sure the fish are stocked at warm water temperatures. If these little pallids like it up in this area, then it is possible that more juvenile pallid sturgeon will be stocked in these areas in the future.
Most of our other warm water species in the area seem to like it here in Region 5. The burbot, sauger and catfish adopted by classrooms throughout Montana are staying in their respective locations for now.
Burbot No. 1 and burbot No. 2 did make minor upstream movements. But our sauger are holding tight in their respective areas, although they should be gearing up for their big downstream spawning migration soon. Catfish No. 2 is eluding the tracking crews. He hasn't been relocated since late February. Our telemetry ground station located at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Bighorn Rivers picked him up making a downstream trek out of the Region 5 tracking area. Hopefully, Region 7 personnel will find him.
It is possible that he may be heading all the way down to the Tongue River, as this was observed in one of our radio-implanted catfish last year when it traveled more than one hundred miles downstream to the Tongue River and upstream in the Tongue a mile or so.
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.