Taggers track muskies at lake

KINKAID LAKE, Ill. -- Shawn Hirst, an Illinois Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist, maneuvered his boat to one of the nets set in the Johnson Creek area of Kinkaid Lake.

As the boat glided slowly across the surface of the water, Dave Muir of Cambria, an Illinois Environmental Protection Agency employee, scooped up a float marking the net.

When the boat came to a halt, Muir stood up in the bow and began pulling in the net. Almost immediately, Hirst's quarry began thrashing about.

"I can feel them swimming in there," Muir said.

There was little wonder Muir could feel the fish. The net contained nine muskellunge more than 35 inches long.

"This is an annual netting," Hirst said. "We're putting Floy tags on them. If anyone catches them they can call me and tell me.

"We put a PIT inside the fish. They'll last the life of the fish."

PIT tags are electronic, about the same size as a grain of rice, and are injected just below the dorsal fin. Floy tags are numbered tags that are inserted through the pectoral fins.

Ongoing study

The netting is part of an ongoing study to determine the growth rates, life span and travels of the muskies that have been stocked in Kinkaid for the past 10 years. They are a species normally associated with colder lakes much further north.

The netting takes place each spring.

"They're moving around now," Hirst said. "In the summer, they'll go deep. They're moving into the shallows. They're going through the spawning motions at least."

After the fish are netted, they are placed in an oxygenated holding tank. Hirst then measures the fish and determines their sex.

Finally, he runs a scanner over the fish to determine whether it had been netted previously and injected with a PIT tag.

"You can't track the fish, it doesn't give off a signal, but it is a permanent tag," Hirst said. "We're looking at population trends, age, sex, longevity. We still don't know how long they live here."

The largest fish captured this year was a robust 47 inches.

This year's netting and tagging was interrupted by the heavy downpours in southern Illinois.

"In theory, [turbid water] helps us because they can't see the nets as well," Hirst said. "But, we've been doing just as well on the other [lower] end."

The deeper south end of the lake wasn't as adversely affected by the heavy rainfall.

Despite the inclement weather, Hirst netted more than 200 fish in a two-week period.

Longevity could become a crucial element in the stocking program, particularly with the fish screen in place at the spillway.

"In the past we've always lost a lot of fish over the spillway," Hirst said. "Now we want to make sure we don't overstock. If we start to get a lot of skinny fish, we might want to cut back on stockings."

"In their natural habitat they live 20-some years. They're much slower growing there, but they live longer. Down here, we've been tagging them since 1998, but we still don't know the longevity of them."

If the fish haven't been netted before, the Floy and PIT tags are placed on and inside the fish. After recording all the data, the fish are immediately released.

The entire process only takes a couple of minutes for each fish.