Sturgeon- They get around

Back on 9/14/2009 the DNR tagged a sturgeon near Everts. It was measured at 13.9 inches.
On 9/15/2015 (6 years later almost to the day!) a client of mine recapture this sturgeon with a length of 37″ in darn near the same location.

Last weekend it was caught again this time over 40 miles up stream near Stillwater!

The length reported was 35″. I guess all of that swimming took some length off of her! LOL!

I try to be as accurate as possible when we catch a tagged fish and I was wondering why there would be a 2″ difference in length. The only think I can come up with is the last angler didn’t lay out the tail as the DNR shows in the sturgeon measuring directions. I would guess it didn’t grow much in a year and since the DNR website doesn’t take fractions, the 2015 reporting could have been rounded down while ours was rounded up?

But either way, this fish after 6 years got a shad up his butt and decided to head to Stillwater.

All the girls I’ve loved before eh.

Thanks for leaving the gates open this year Brian

What is the web page that you can look this information up on?

The water is colder, so maybe it was shrinkage.

Tuma wrote:

What is the web page that you can look this information up on?

Tuma, we can’t exactly look it up.

Once an angler lands a tagged fish, take the length, girth, weight to the Tagged Fish Reporting site.

http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/fisheries/tagged_fish_reporting/step1.html

Please leave the tag in the fish for future information.

Once the Dnr receives it, they will send back that tagging and recapture information.

Even if you didn’t get any measurements, just knowing the fish is alive helps.

I guess I understand why they would not just have all that information out for everyone to look at.

Tuma wrote:

I guess I understand why they would not just have all that information out for everyone to look at.

They never get accurate locations from me, but they’re not overly inaccurate either.

The more you turn in the more tidbits of info you get.

I hope some day the dnr let’s me tag fish… Certainty not hard to do and I could definitely get more info out there for the dnr. I’d like to get Joel in my boat this fall. Get him his first over 5′.

The other difficulty Brian is often anglers aren’t prepared to measure a fish the length of a sturgeon or just estimate a length. Both are reasons we often see variations in length between captures.

When I was still working in Baudette we were sampling a spawning Lake Sturgeon population and handled the same male fish 5-6 times over the course of a week or so. The lengths we measured over that time probably varied plus or minus half an inch just because of difficulties measuring such large powerful fish.

As always we encourage anglers to report any tagged fish they catch. The more accurate the information anglers provide during that process the better the movement and growth data we can develop and provide back to you in tag return letters/emails.

I am sure it was done through the DNR. But hasn’t MUSKIES INC bought, stocked, and tagged muskies in some lakes? I am sure if you took a course and was willing to buy all the proper tagging equipment that they use. I don’t see why they couldn’t give you a permit to do so.

I asked about tagging fish about 10 years ago.

The person needs to be trained for consistency. Even then as Nick mentioned the measurements can be off.

Next was mentioned the paper work. Seems like rain, wind and hungry dogs are issues after the fish has been tagged. The worst thing that can happen is a tag is reported and the DNR doesn’t have it listed at all.

Of course there are some people that would do an excellent job tagging, but if there’s just one or two volunteers that mess things up it screws up the whole data base.

This was how we ended up with having a tagging day back in ’06 or ’07. Everyone was invited to fish a community hole on the St Croix. We averaged 13 boats over the 3 hours we were out there.

We ended up with 25 tagged fish and one recapture. A number of fish were released before tagging because the DNR couldn’t get to them fast enough.

It seemed to work out well for everyone involved.