You might find this interesting. I used to go on yearly Walleye Surveys with the G&F. We would spend about three hours at night on the lake during the walleye spawn in March/April to collect fish which were measured, sexed, and a scale taken to determine age. A couple of times, we were also trying to recover fish that had magnetic tags implanted in them from a previous year. Might add we never did find any tags.
Anyway, the way it worked was that you ran a shoreline and electroshocked for about 20 minutes. All fish were scooped up in nets and the amount of fish you caught every 20 minutes were worked against some kind of magic formula to figure out the number of walleye in a given area. Not sure how correct it was but I do know it at least gave you a baseline from year to year to see if the population in a given location was getting bigger or smaller.
When the 20 minutes were up, we would pull the boat to the shoreline and do the survey on the fish caught to determine if they were boys or girls (mostly caught boys), how long they were, and take a scale to figure out their age. Female walleye were hard to come by because they stayed in deep water out of reach of the electroshock radiation area.
In the years that I was involved with this, I never seen a walleye die from being electroshocked. They were just stunned and after the 20 minute trip, they were ready to go back into the lake. We also stunned bass, carp, crappie, stripers, hybrids and whites but since we were only after the walleye, we just left them to recover and maybe become a little smarter.
Click on: http://picasaweb.google.com/rac55ster/FishGame?authkey=pLXFgdtNR94 and you'll see a few pictures of the operation. I am new at using Picasa but I think I did it right. Will click on the URL myself to make sure it works.
Cheers.....
Anyway, the way it worked was that you ran a shoreline and electroshocked for about 20 minutes. All fish were scooped up in nets and the amount of fish you caught every 20 minutes were worked against some kind of magic formula to figure out the number of walleye in a given area. Not sure how correct it was but I do know it at least gave you a baseline from year to year to see if the population in a given location was getting bigger or smaller.
When the 20 minutes were up, we would pull the boat to the shoreline and do the survey on the fish caught to determine if they were boys or girls (mostly caught boys), how long they were, and take a scale to figure out their age. Female walleye were hard to come by because they stayed in deep water out of reach of the electroshock radiation area.
In the years that I was involved with this, I never seen a walleye die from being electroshocked. They were just stunned and after the 20 minute trip, they were ready to go back into the lake. We also stunned bass, carp, crappie, stripers, hybrids and whites but since we were only after the walleye, we just left them to recover and maybe become a little smarter.
Click on: http://picasaweb.google.com/rac55ster/FishGame?authkey=pLXFgdtNR94 and you'll see a few pictures of the operation. I am new at using Picasa but I think I did it right. Will click on the URL myself to make sure it works.
Cheers.....