The USFWS’s
AutoFish System will
answer a host of
questions, including:
Is it wild or
hatchery-produced?
Every
Fish has
a Story
Story By Kathy Andrews
Photos By Adele Hodde
Tracking the harvest and move-ment
of the 32 million trout and
salmon stocked in the Great
Lakes basin annually is a daunting
task considering those fish can
swim in 6 quadrillion gallons of water,
or about 95 percent of the United States’
fresh surface water. And yet, understand-ing
the dynamics of that population is
necessary to support a $7 billion annual
sport and commercial fishing industry.
With eight states, two tribal authori-ties,
the Province of Ontario and two
federal governments having a vested
interest in the trout and salmon fish
community, inter-jurisdictional cooper-ation
is imperative to manage this valu-able
fishery. An example of this cooper-ation
is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service’s mass-marking program that
will assist with state and tribal manage-ment
strategies utilizing revolutionary
technology that will take the trout and
salmon fishery into the 21st century.
At the center of the initiative is the
AutoFish System, a computer-operated
mobile fish-tagging and fin-clipping trail-er.
A fleet of these trailers will travel to
hatcheries throughout the Great Lakes
basin, allowing for the rapid marking of
trout and salmon prior to stocking.
“Under the old, labor-intensive sys-tem,
fish were anesthetized and
removed from the water for process-ing,”
explained Jim Webster, USFWS
fisheries biologist. “In an 8-hour period,
a team of laborers could process less
than 25,000 fish. With the computer-ized
system, more than 60,000 fish can
be processed in the same amount of
time without the use of an anesthetic,
human handling or being removed
from the water.”
The AutoFish system is quick, safe
and efficient. Fish pass through the
“Illinois’ initial participation in the Aut-oFish
process took place earlier this year,
with the March tagging of 262,000 Chi-nook
salmon spawned in October 2010,”
Steve Robillard, Department of Natural
Resources Lake Michigan Program biolo-gist
said. “Those fish were 5-6 inches in
length when they were released in
Diversey,Waukegan and Jackson harbors
in early May. Our staff and USFWS will
begin to collect snouts from those Chi-nook
over the next few years since most
of those fish will be caught in 2013.”
Fish that had been clipped and
tagged possess information that fishery
managers are anxious to include in the
Great Lakes fishery database.
trailer with minimal human contact and
with less than 0.1 percent mortality.
Utilizing computers, flowing water and
the instinctual nature of these fish, the
adipose fin is clipped off and a coded
wire tag inserted into the snout. The
long-term goal is to mark every trout or
salmon stocked into the Great Lakes.
Those two simple markings will
result in a wealth of information avail-able
to evaluate fish management efforts
across an extensive geographic area.
“Resource managers recognize the
importance of evaluating the salmon
and trout releases occurring within the
Great Lakes,” said Mark Holey, project
leader with the USFWS Green Bay Fish-ery
Resources Office. “After anglers and
creel survey staff return the coded tags,
the information will be entered into a
database that will provide infinite
opportunities to assess the growth,
movement and survival of stocked fish,
something that we’ve never been able
to do before.”
The initial examination of fish will
allow managers to quickly determine if
the fish was produced in the wild or in
a hatchery. If hatchery-reared, tag infor-mation
will create a record of where,
when and which agency was responsi-ble
for stocking the fish, and ultimately
will translate into the age, growth, sur-vival
and movement of the fish.
According to Aaron Woldt, USFWS
Region 3 Fisheries Program supervisor,
only a fraction of the fish stocked were
tagged under the old system.
“Utilizing the AutoFish System and
tagging millions of fish will ultimately
allow us to understand how many
salmon and trout are produced in the
wild and we’ll be able to balance the
number stocked with the available prey
sources,” Woldt explained. “The data
collected also could be used to com-pare
results from different lakes,
measure the success of habitat improve-ments
and observe population trends
that may be related to climate
changes.” This year, the USFWS, with
cooperating state agencies, plans to tag
and fin-clip 4.7 million Chinook salmon
and 4.8 million lake trout to be stocked
into lakes Huron and Michigan.
August 2011 12 / OutdoorIllinois August 2011 OutdoorIllinois / 13
After the computerized process auto-matically
sorts and distributes fish
by length, they are precisely clipped,
tagged and inventoried, then
released into a hatchery raceway.
Tagging fish with microscopic,
coded-wire tags will improve
our understanding of released
fish populations. (Photos courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.)
Started in 2010 by President Obama,
the Great Lakes Restoration Initia-tive
targets the most significant envi-ronmental
problems confronting the
Great Lakes today. Through an intera-gency
agreement with the U.S. Environ-mental
Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service has been allocated
approximately $37.4 million in FY 2011
to implement GLRI priority programs,
projects and activities to protect,
restore, and maintain the Great Lakes
ecosystem. For more information on
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service GLRI pro-jects,
visit www.fws.gov/GLRI.
Lake Michigan creel
and size limits
Salmon and trout harvested from Lake
Michigan must be a minimum of 10
inches in length. The daily creel limit is
five salmon/trout, except for lake trout,
which has a daily creel limit of two.
