Friday, March 12, 2010
Stalking muskies
A project aims to get a handle on the population of these toothy predators in the James River.
Biologists use hypodermic needles to insert coded electronic tags into the abdomens of captured muskies.
PHOTOS BY JARED SOARES The Roanoke Times
Bud LaRoche, regional fisheries manager for the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, hands a muskie to biologist Dan Wilson during a late-February electroshocking trip on the James River in Botetourt County.
Regional Fisheries Manager Bud LaRoche assembles electroshock gear to collect muskies for a study being coordinated by fisheries tech Cory Kovacs Monday at Horseshoe Bend of the James River in Botetourt County.
Mark Taylor is outdoors editor at The Roanoke Times.
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BUCHANAN -- Muskellunge anglers are a hardy lot.
They are willing to put in long days on the water just for the charge they get when they finally coax one of the toothy monsters into striking.
The anticipation of such thrilling strikes, which seem to becoming more attainable on the James River, is part of what is fueling increased interest in muskie fishing on the river.
That interest is prompting an effort by the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries to collect information on the river's muskies, such as their growth rates, movement patterns and annual mortality.
"We started stocking muskies in the 1970s," said DGIF fisheries technician Cory Kovacs, who is heading up the James River study. "But not until the 1990s did we start getting much of a return."
That return can be tracked a couple of different ways.
One, the agency is seeing good numbers of James River muskies show up in its Virginia Angler Recognition Program, which awarded 13 citations for James muskies last year.
The game department is also seeing more muskies showing up in its general fish sampling efforts.
The James River muskie project uses implanted electronic tags.
Adult fish are implanted with passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags, each of which carries a specific code.
If the fish is recaptured, a special code reader will pick up the digits, which allows Kovacs to determine how much the fish has grown and how far it has traveled from its original capture point.
The team is also tagging stocked muskies, about 3,300 of which are placed in the river annually.
Those fish, which are about 4 inches long when they are stocked, all carry an internal coded wire tag.
The tags don't carry individual numbers, but rather a single digit to identify the year they were stocked.
"It's like you have 3,300 twins," Kovacs said.
Tracking stocked fish will help determine growth rates of the fish. It will also help determine how much natural reproduction is occurring.
A recent muskie tracking project on the New River provided the agency with valuable information, including proof that natural reproduction is occurring, though better in some years than others.
The New is far and away the state's best muskie fishery, with 75 citations last year.
Kovacs, with the help of DGIF biologists, started collecting and tagging adult muskies in late 2008.
His goal is to tag 200 fish, which are collected using electroshocking gear that momentarily stuns fish so they can be scooped into nets.
Biologist Scott Smith, Kovacs' supervisor, was skeptical.
"I didn't think he had a chance of getting that many," Smith admitted.
But Kovacs is already close.
After a Wednesday shocking mission near Lynchburg the tally stood at 186 muskies.
Just like with hook-and-line fishing, some days are better than others.
High and muddy water conditions forced the delay of several planned shocking forays this season.
On a rainy and cold Monday in late February, Kovacs and four biologists spent the day in three boats collecting fish near the Narrow Passage boat ramp, and near the town of Buchanan.
Conditions weren't ideal, with strong flows and murky water, but the team still managed to catch 10 muskies ranging from one 16 inches long to a 42-inch, 23-pounder.
When a stunned muskie would thrash to the surface, the netter would quickly scoop the fish up and place it in a water-filled tank.
The first step in processing a fish was to check to see if it had been previously tagged.
The small fish had been tagged -- having been stocked in 2009 -- and one of the adult fish also had been previously tagged.
The team then weighed and measured the fish, and then inserted the PIT tag.
The size of a grain of rice, the PIT tag is inserted in the fish's abdomen using a hypodermic needle.
Because the tags are internal, fishermen will have no way of knowing if the muskie they catch has been tagged.
Many dedicated muskie anglers release all of their fish. But even if anglers keep a fish, and that fish happens to carry a tag, it could still provide some information to Kovacs.
When tagged fish stop showing up in future collections, it can indicate mortality, some of it due to angling.
That information is all part of the big picture the team hopes to better understand when the study ends in about four years.
"We're putting all of these fish in there," Kovacs said. "We need to know what's happening to them."
