Written by Brandon Honig
When Austin Demarest and his team started looking for white sturgeon to tag in the San Joaquin River in March, he knew some days would be uneventful — on the boat at dawn for a full day of setting and retrieving empty nets. Other days, however, would put them to the test.
Their first morning on the river, the Lodi Fish and Wildlife Office team anchored four 12-foot-tall nets to the river bottom and to the shoreline about 100 feet away, then waited to see which kind of day it would be.
“We captured seven within the first 30 minutes. In past years, we were lucky if we got two in a single capture,” said Demarest, who had over two years of experience surgically implanting tiny acoustic transmitters, or tags, in white sturgeon and other fish. “Catching seven at a time was a completely new experience. It was pretty hectic.”
Click here to read this article from the US Fish & Wildlife Service.
