Tagged Walleye

[cmoreau]

If you catch a Walleye with a white tag near the second dorsal fin please report the tag #, date and location of capture as well as if the fish was released or harvested.

Tagged fish have been released in the Edward's Narrows (Hunter Lake/Lac Bedout) area of Kipawa Lake, although they may travel large distances throughout the watershed.

I am a graduate student in Fisheries and Aquatic Science with the University of Florida as my major project I am doing an assessment of catch and release survival rates for Walleye. Your participation and reporting of tagged fish is appreciated. Please provide your contact info as well so that your name may be entered into a draw for prizes.

You may report tagged fish via email christina159@ufl.edu or by phone 705-980-1228.

Thank you,

Christina Moreau

[puckster_guy]

How cool is that? I'd love that you keep us posted as to results of your survey. It will be cool to know how it turns out.

[Administrator]

@cmoreau, I have made this topic a sticky and will leave it up for most of the year or thoughout your research. How long will you be researching the walleye?  As @puckster_guy said, I would think everyone here would be most interested in your findings. Thank you for posting this.

[600 miles north]

     I also think that is a very interesting project and hope that you will share the results and keep us posted. I am especially curious about the migration of the fish and how long it takes them to travel to other sections of the lake. Hopefully the vast majority of people will contribute to your data if a tagged fish is caught.

     How many fish were tagged, and were they fish caught or netted in the kipawa area, or were they introduced to the lake from a fishery?

     Good luck on your venture.

     Brad

[RHYBAK]

I agree that this is an excellent adventure.
I'm curious as to how many tagged fish are in Kipawa for this study.

[Dog]

@cmoreau
Christina, Thank you for having interest in this region for your study. I'm curious what the objective of the study is? To find spawning grounds or determine migration patterns or average lifespan? I'm sure we'd love to hear all about your long term goals.

[600 miles north]

Does anyone out there know of any results that came about from this tagging project on lac Kipawa?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8G2CtzOe3c

Brad

[Walleye Maven]

We caught several tagged fish this past week near Edward's Narrows.

Released one, and caught him again in 10 minutes.

The numbers will be sent in by the guys that caught them.

I will be interested to hear the results of the study, I believe it has to do with mortality rates of released fish.

[cmoreau]

Thank you for all the positive feedback about my project. The goal is to assess how many Walleye survive the catch and release process, both short term (72 hours) where fish are held in a cage and long term (tagging). Fish are caught by anglers already fishing the lake using the same techniques they normally would, any fish that they would have put back in the lake is used in this study (no netting or introduced fish) . To date 51 Walleye have been tagged but over the course of this season I will be tagging 300-500 Walleye. Thank you to the moderator for pinning my post, the tag returns will be important for both this season as well as next as I will be tagging into October of this year. If you don't mind leaving it pinned until I let you know I have finished with the tag returns that would be appreciated (I am likely looking at those tag returns until Sept-Oct 2015).

The main objective is to assess mortality, but some data about migration patterns may be obtained provided I have good return data on the tags. It is still very early on in the study but to date short term survival has been good (although I predict this could change over the warmer months).

@Walleye Maven if the guys in your group who caught the tagged fish could please send me the following info: tag #, date and location of capture as well as if the fish was released or harvested it would be greatly appreciated. Also name and contact info so they can be entered in the draw, it can be emailed to christina159@ufl.edu, or they could also call the lodge. One tag was found in the cabin when it was being cleaned, I have the tag # but no data to go along with it.

Thank you,

Christina

[johnny walleye]

GREAT WORK THANKS

[puckster_guy]

I was thinking about your study Christine. More about how fish migrate in such a large body of water. My thought was along thw lines of a similar study. Tag fish from the spawning grounds at the red pine chutes and other major spawning grounds to see where they come from and where thet disperse to. The common sentiment seems to be when walleye aren't at there summer spots yet "the fish aren't here yet"

[cmoreau]

puckster_guy yes that would be cool to see how they migrate from spawning areas and through the watershed. Best not to disturb fish on spawning grounds though, but this could be done with satellite tags, basically they work like a little GPS tracker and you could tag at another time of year and then you can follow their movements. Very expensive though to run that sort of project.

[Nancy]

@cmoreau , I was just wondering how many fish were reported to you this year. Very pleased that our board was notified of this project.

[cmoreau]

@Nancy thanks for the interest, I haven't yet had a chance to do much with my data. I will be looking at tag returns until next fall and around this time next year I will have done my data analysis, etc and have some results. So please report any tags captured this upcoming fishing season or if you have any from last season that you may not have yet reported. Thank you,

Christina

[Dog]

@cmoreau thank you for bring a bit of science to the fishing community. It's one of the reasons I love In-Fisherman magazine because they tend to publish a lot of fishing based research findings and being an engineer I tend to gravitate towards that.... I look forward to reading about any correlations you can draw from the tags reported.

I always thought it'd be neat to tag all fish in an ecosystem with real-time trackers to follow their movements and try to correlate that with weather patterns, time of year, time of day etc... they've done it with sharks in the ocean but the size and cost of the tag make it cost prohibitive right now for freshwater game fish I think... anyway, thanks again for taking the time to collect the data.