MNDNR Metro Catfish Project

Greetings everyone. I figured I had better get moving on getting the word out about the MNDNR Metro Catfish Project that will be continuing this year. For those of you that don’t know, we put a short survey online http://www.surveymonkey.com/catfish to begin to gather some information and see if catfish anglers would be willing to participate in keeping a catfish diary. If you have already taken the survey, thank you. If you have not taken the survey, I encourage you to take it. It should only take a few minutes to complete.

We plan to continue tagging both channel and flathead catfish this year and is geared towards the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area. There are many things we are trying to find out with this project and the associated catfish diaries, but we can learn so much more about managing catfish if we can get anglers to participate in keeping these diaries. I know some of you have already been keeping your own data over the years. This is an attempt to learn from such detailed information.

I don’t know how many anglers kept diaries last year. We had many minor problems that likely resulted in very few diaries being kept. If you did keep a diary last year, you can e-mail the file to me at [email protected] or you can contact me at that e-mail address to get a mailing address. Also, if you did already indicate that you were going to participate last year (or if you were planning to and didn’t), I will have your contact information and will be sending out messages to those people soon.

I would still like to host a meeting sometime soon (thinking a Saturday afternoon in St Paul) to discuss this project as well as other catfish activities that we have been working on recently. I know there was some concern over providing detailed locations of tagged fish caught as well as some other concerns. The tagging project is scheduled to continue into 2012 and the tags will likely be retained for a long time. Having passionate anglers out there recording their catfishing efforts and providing details on tagged fish caught would greatly help us improve our knowledge of this growing sport.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Joel Stiras
Metro Catfish Project Lead

Welcome to IDO Joel!

Hey Joel!

You must have gotten to take a couple seconds for a breath between projects.

Thanks for your work Joel! Don’t let the walleye guys here scare you.

I should have many more logs this year now that I have something to record the GPA with.

I’m in, hope i can help.

Welcome Joe it`s about time more studies were done catfish…Thanks

While your at it Joe please send me copies of the diaries too. Make sure they come with pics to, so we can find the correct spots where the information was coming from….

FYI, I’m hoping to send out e-mails today to confirm who is in and who is out and who can receive my messages when I blind copy a large list. Be sure to add [email protected] to your SAFE list to receive my emails and attachments. Might want to check your Junk Mail folders to see if my message ends up there.

I just signed up, and I have Numbers (like Excel only not from Microsoft) on my iPad, which I always take fishing with me (God knows when you’ll need google maps or your email while you’re on the water, yeah? hehe)

So far this year, though, me and my buddy Jeff have been sucking wind bigtime. One fish between the 2 of us for the year.