That's a big fish! It must be an old one!

Nick, thanks for the information. This is great information. It is always appreciated.

These charts are not perfect from what I understand but the best thing we have. One thing to remind all of us that read this is to report all tagged fish. Tagged fish gives the most accurate information if recorded correct. Just a reminder anyways to me and the rest of us. This is one area that we can help our good guys like Nick. If you catch a tagged fish make sure to take great care for the fish and report the information to your local DNR.

You are right buschman that some of the data in the charts is extrapolated from a subsample. For instance of the 2260 Sauger that were sampled in that table I aged 1267 with otoliths, and applied those lengths to the others. The Walleye figure on the other hand is even tighter, because of the 611 fish included 590 of them were aged with otoliths leaving only about 20 fish (mostly Age1 fish based on the table) unaged.

Tag data does help us with age and growth information (for instance we had a paddlefish that was at large for ~20 years and only grew an inch or so), but is most useful for movement information which we don’t get from standard sampling conducted in the same location year after year.

Thanks in advance to any folks that take the time to accurately record measurement, location, and tag number data from a fish they capture and report to us. If it comes to me I try to provide a history of the fish both in table and map form if possible so folks can understand that they are an important part of the tagging studies we have ongoing.