Adopt-A-Fish update – May 22, 2008
a major tributary to the Missouri in Montana.
on a very different year
By MIKE RUGGLES
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks
FORT PECK -- Graduations and the end of the school year are closing in on us as we conclude the 2008 Missouri-Yellowstone Adopt-A-Fish Program. It seems each year for the program is different.
This year, we had the chilliest weather and water conditions since the Adopt-a-Fish program began in 2002. Cool air temperatures kept water temperatures cool and stalled the normal spring pulses of higher river flows. This delay kept most of the critters close to their watery wintering areas throughout the past two months.
Over the past two weeks, waters have finally started to warm and the Yellowstone is now getting a pulse of higher flows, too. This has prompted the fish to move more and soon they will be in their summer feeding areas.
Not only was the weather different. All fish species are different, too. Burbot spawn in the winter. Male catfish make nests in spring. Others use gravel to lay eggs on. Some need flowing water and some need still water. Some need flooded plants or underwater plants to lay their eggs on.
But they do have common needs. All of the species we followed need the varied habitats of a large river system that the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers in Montana and North Dakota provide. Only with suitable habitat will the fish and turtles in this program and the nearly 45 other fish species, other turtles, frogs and aquatic insects in these rivers continue to exist.
Why would a biologist be interested in learning how it all fits together? I attended a career day luncheon with students in Nashua Monday. It had been awhile since I looked back at why I became a biologist.
To me, it was my intense interest of what’s around me, why it’s there, and how it works. I discovered that the exotic places seen on the Discovery Channel could easily be in our own backyards.
To a biologist, it’s the excitement of looking deeper into these places and discovering what the different critters who live there need to exist and how they all make a living finding food and a safe place to live.
So when you’re out enjoying the great outdoors this summer, look around and look deeper into the places near where you live. When you head to the waters, ask yourself what you know about that emerald shiner or flathead chub swimming nearby or the walleye, sauger, trout or bass on the end of your fishing line? What do you know about that turtle on the log or the pelican out on the gravel bar?
If after looking and asking, your interest in learning more about them is stilling going strong, maybe you might grow up to become a biologist, learn all about them and share what you learned with others, too.
Thank you to everyone that has followed this year’s Adopt-A-Fish Program from the biologists in Billings, Glendive and Fort Peck. Have a good summer and we hope to meet you someday out on the waters.
Weekly updates on our radio-implanted fish can be found on the Missouri-Yellowstone Adopt-A-Fish home page with updates posted each week from April through Memorial Day. 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.
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.