By Amber Fedus, PhD candidate at Trent University
From April through early June, I worked with Kurt Smith from DFO, along with several volunteers from our lab, to tag some elusive muskie on Stoney Lake. Going into this field season, we had many tags that needed to be put into muskie. We had been concerned that we wouldn’t be able to tag as many fish as we wanted to, after having a tough time the last couple years trying to catch them. Despite our concerns, we ended up coming out of the spring tagging season with a total of 29 more muskies tagged! Special thanks to members of the Kawartha Lakes Chapter of Muskies Canada for coming out on muskie opener to assist with angling muskies to get our remaining tags out.
A sped-up video is below showing our tagging process. In total, we tagged 21 fish that were caught by lectrofishing (mostly in April) and eight that were caught by angling. In 2022 and 2023 combined, we had only tagged a total of eight muskies. Of the 29 muskies we tagged this spring, they ranged in size from 17 to 47 inches in length (average = 35 inches). We had a range of tag sizes available to suit the size of the fish.
Muskies Canada Inc. (MCI) awarded us a two-year research grant to support this project, and members of the Kawartha Lakes Chapter of MCI have also provided generous donations. Because of these donations, we were able to purchase sensor tags for the muskies, meaning that in addition to tracking their movements we’ll get information on acceleration (activity levels), depth, and body temperature. We’re going to be able to generate a lot of amazing insights into the diverse behavioural strategies muskies use, and help better understand their habitat needs.
Kurt recently led the downloading of our acoustic receivers, in addition to other sensors that record things like temperature, light levels, and oxygen. Those downloads mean we now have over 20 million detections of our tagged fish across the system. It’s a huge pile of data we’ll be able to use to answer questions about fish movement and habitat use over the next several years. We'll share some findings here soon.
In addition to tracking the behaviour and habitat use of fish, we’re doing as much as we can to collect other types of data to help explain how and why the fish are doing what they’re doing. To that end, I will be doing a lot more fieldwork this summer to sample smaller organisms, sediment, and algae from sites across the lake. These will be used to analyze chemical tracers (stable isotopes) to figure out what the fish we’ve tagged are eating, where they’re eating, and how energy is moving through the food web.
(Above) Photo of some of our field crew from this spring, including Jacob Bowman (left), Leah Howitt (middle), and myself (Amber, right). In the surgery trough is a muskellunge at the end of what is a brief (5 min) surgery, about to be released. The fish's gills are flushed with fresh lake water throughout the process.
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