Now that is a big fish!! My first four weeks with the sturgeon...

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It's the first day of June and hard to believe. I'm not sure if it feels like August or it feels like the beginning of May, but either way, my sense of time has completely diminished. I'm not in Onaway although that is where I have been for the past month. I'm actually currently in Duluth, Minnesota, but I'll save the reasons why and the photos for my next entry.

This entry is about the last 31 days. Is that all it has been? It has felt like 4 months...not 4 weeks. Why? One word: Sturgeon! But let me start just a few days prior to that. On Friday April 29, I was finished with all of my classes and had just one final paper to write up. So I packed up my room, moved all of my stuff to a local storage unit (besides my bed which my good friend Mike helped me move that Sunday), and got everything ready for the field. On Saturday afternoon, the grad fam all converged at Lake Lansing North for a farewell barbeque that was just awesome. Exhausted but anxious grads, the new Dog-nasty that my friend Sarah adopted from the shelter we both volunteer at, Dave's mohawk, and some great food and beer. We had a lot of fun just relaxing for a few hours and I got some great photos and hugs as they wished me off for the summer. It was a little sad as I drove home because these people have become my best friends, my family, and my support! But we all had our own adventures to take off for and nothing seemed more exciting than the sturgeon.

After moving my final things on Sunday, saying goodbye to my roommy Alyssa, and having a nice lunch with Mike, I hit the road and headed north. Things were pretty quiet the first night...the 1st of May, but they took off the next day as John and I walked down to the dam to take a temperature reading with the YSI and a sturgeon porpoised right in front of me. IT...WAS...AWESOME! My first sight of a lake sturgeon and I started hopping up and down like a little girl. Then it hit me -- why were they at the dam?!? Usually, the sturgeon don't reach that spot and for good reason. The environment has completely changed and is not the best spawning grounds. But the high flow conditions recently allowed them to make it to the dam only we weren't aware of how many until two days later.

The next morning, Kim arrived and we all walked Sites 1 through 7 of the river, further downstream where the sturgeon usually spawn. We caught 10 adults and I learned quickly the roles of the sturgeon sampling crew. You have the netters, the blockers, the data recorder, the runner, and if enough people, the random spotter that stands there and does nothing but point out where the fish are. I quickly became Katy's under-study on data recording and time just seemed to fly by. We took measurements, PIT tagged all the fish, marked them with my unique floy combos, weighed them, took a photo with their I.D., checked for gametes, then packed everything up and continued downstream. I was a little worn out after that first day on May 3rd, but May 4th would be the longest of my life. We worked out a deal with the dam operator and had him drop the water level for us to get in the river below the dam on the morning of the 4th. When we came down to the dam, we just stared in awe. There were lake sturgeon everywhere -- at least 100 in a small area and it was just chaos as we sampled as many as we could. We only had a short window so we pumped through 30 fish before we took a short break. And with those 30, we got our first set of eggs. Actually, we got eggs from 4 females that day which meant hours of fertilizing.

That afternoon, I was sent off with my re-bar contraptions and the new tech, Ryan, to set up my experiment. Of course, this was not the wisest decision as Ryan and I barely had any ideas of where we were going and had never fertilized sturgeon eggs before. Nevertheless, I was re-assured to follow these simple steps and get it done and my experiment started. So we headed off into the woods at 5:30 p.m. We didn't emerge from the first site until it had already gotten dark and both Ryan and I were exhausted. We had carried 8 poles and 2 heavy re-bar systems (see my last blog for a detailed photo of this ridiculously heavy and bulky contraption) down a steep, barely boarded trail to my experiment site. I was thankful to have him at least as he was a HUGE help, put up with me not having any idea what I was doing, and pounded in my poles as I placed sturgeon eggs on a buffer pad after mixing a small water bucket with sturgeon milt (aka sperm). Luckily, Kim tracked us down just as we were placing the pads on the re-bar and tied them down. We went back to the hatchery, scarfed down some food, did the fertilizations, and went down to the dam with the egg pads (it takes 30 minutes to get them to adhere to the buffer pad so we had to wait a little). Then Kim and John helped pound the systems in and hold them up as I zip-tied the pads down. That was at 12:30a.m. Everyone else headed home, but John offered to help so he, Ryan, and I headed to F05 bridge(after a short stop to grab a cup of coffee) and put in my last 2 re-bars there and I did the final fertilizations. By 3:30a.m., we were headed back to the hatchery to grab Masa who was also doing fertilizations until the late morning and were finally home at 4a.m.

The next morning, I was kind of dragging as we headed to work at 8a.m. and were met with more adult sampling and even more eggs. Luckily, Ryan and I got an earlier start and we got another re-bar in, all of the fertilizations done, and were home by about 11:30p.m. Nevertheless, we were still both exhausted. The next day, we got another female and John offered to help me so we were done by about 8:30pm or so. At the end of those three days, we had sampled about 100 adults, had gotten eggs from 6 females, acquired milt from 12 males (always 2 per female), and had lots of eggs in the hatchery to monitor. Every day, we continued to sample the river and for 2.5 hours of each afternoon, I and one other person went to my re-bar sites, pulled them up, picked off dead eggs, and monitored their development. The days were long but a blur as more adults were sampled, more of the river was walked, we walked down from the dam which was a treacherous 1 hour walk to Site 1, and I took dO and Temp measurements every day at my re-bar sites. After a few days, F05 was excluded from my sampling as the crayfish decided my egg mats were their own personal buffet platters and every egg was carefully picked off with their stupid little claws. When I found one at the dam trying to eat the eggs a couple days later, I pulled him off and stepped on him with my wader boots. He died with a full belly -- about 400 sturgeon eggs. Luckily, 8 families of fish made it despite the harsh predation and on Friday the 13th, I pulled all of the mats out of the water which proved to be more complicated than I thought. I cut off each buffer pad, put them into a 2 gallon ziplock bag filled with water, and carefully walked them through the woods and across trails back to the truck. It was tough and a lot heavier than I imagined, but a visiting professor and I got it done and again, I was thankful to have the help.

The next few days were also a blur as I spent more time in the hatchery than at the house. After going out and sampling the river every day, I pulled dead eggs off the mats, collected hatched larvae, took hundreds of photos (every fish that hatched had to have a photo), and started the 2nd part of the study -- the behavior component. For six families, I randomized individuals that hatched and put them into a cup to see if time to emergence was different between sites. One late night when I worked until 6a.m. and watched the sun come up, I wrote on the work calendar the first day I had became nocturnal. To add to my work load, the second run of fish arrived in Site B one warm weekend and I had even more eggs. Given that my F05 eggs didn't make it, I re-vamped my experiment and set up a new flume system in 1 day. Two days later, we got the 2nd run eggs (the same time I was taking photos from the 1st experiment) and I had to fertilize them and place them on plates and then screw them down inside a cut PVC pipe with water moving over it. I remember being so exhausted by that point that I just stared at my set-up for about 30 minutes before finalizing my design and getting my second wind. The next few days were a blur and I somehow made it home that week around 2a.m. the first night, 3a.m. the second, and 6a.m. the next. Luckily, things started slowing down after all of the 1st experiment fish were in cups and the 2nd run eggs were in the PVC (flumes).

During all of this egg work, I was also monitoring adult behavior during our daily walks of the stream and sampling. We had floy tagged 187 fish when a bunch started coming back and I was seeing some interesting trends that have not been noted before. I also tried recording video of spawning and quickly learned that when fish are "releasing" eggs and milt into the water column, being behind them with a camera and a snorkel is not the best place to be. But I did get one good video with a female releasing her eggs before I fell on a rock. I also lost my dive slate pencil so ended up having to memorize a floy combination, run out of the water, write it down in a notebook, and trudge back into the water. But I had a blast in my wetsuit as I quickly learned how curious sturgeon are. One came over to check me out and set its mouth on my foot then wandered off. A couple more swam up next to me and leaned their body against me as I crouched in the water, trying to stay in place and film a female. A couple also let me reach down and run my hand along their back as they just rested. It was amazing!! And in that moment I realized just how lucky I was to spend so much time with these fish.

I didn't get the chance to take much more video as I became the full-time data recorder, but I still had a blast on adult sampling. A friend of mine drove up for the day, but the weather was so bad, she didn't get to see an adult sturgeon. I think she was a little bummed too, but hopefully she enjoyed the larval sturgeon and seeing the hatchery. The next day, another friend of mine and his family even came up from Lansing and he sampled the adults with us. Although he fell in, I think he had a blast and we may have even turned a hyena researcher into a sturgeon guy. Haha...okay probably not, but he definitely had fun! So as you can tell, with all of the experiments, hatchery work, hatching fish, photos to take, and cleaning, time has gone by fast. We've also had some press on our research, been trying to update the blog, have been working with Sturgeon for Tomorrow, got interviewed by a documentary film maker, and even had a newspaper reporter come out with us one day. For the first two weeks, we also had a lot of kids come by and ask to touch a sturgeon which makes our job even more fun! 😊 For the first few weeks, I also felt pretty good because a Sturgeon for Tomorrow lady started looking after me. My hands got sunburned and irritated from being in cold water and swelled up for about 3 days. Every day, she she would come and ask how I was doing with all of them boys and if my hands were looking any better. They ended up peeling and then scaring a little and were pink for about 3 more days, but after a week, you could finally see my knuckles again. They're pretty cleared up now and just more tan than the rest of my body, but for about two weeks there, I was bandaging my finger tips every day because they kept splitting open and stinging. They're pretty back to normal now and I'm back to getting at least 7 hours of sleep every night.

Two days ago, I hit Day 30 without a day off and John and I worked drift together. It was a gorgeous night and actually went by pretty quick. We put out nets every hour from 9 p.m. until 2 a.m. and sample every hour for larval sturgeon. It wasn't too bad and I actually had fun as we caught bass, shiners, lamprey, kept getting hit by beetles with red eyes that were attracted to our headlamps, heard bats screech through the night, and looked up to a gorgeous sky of stars. We picked larvae out of debris for about 5 hours before packing everything up and heading home around 3:30a.m. It's definitely been an exhausting four weeks, but just amazing!! I'm also a little sad that the adults are mostly gone from the river. We've still been sampling every day and when there isn't much to sample, cruising down the river in a wetsuit with a snorkel is more like play as you feel the warm sun on your back and see the small schools of perch dart off as you swim over. We've also gotten a video of lamprey spawning, seen some mottled sculpin hiding against the rocks, come across snakes, turtles, chubs, and frogs, and laughed as the techs tried to net big suckers and almost falling in. The nice part about spending your days with biologists are that they get excited about everything in the river too. Our main focus is the sturgeon, but they also appreciate the smaller fish, enjoy chasing off the hundreds of suckers, and get excited when catching hellbenders in the drift nets. And the Black River looks gorgeous from the hatchery. We're surrounded by deer, elk, herons, hawks, and even saw a juvenile bald eagle the other day. It's a great place to spend the summer and I feel pretty lucky every day to be at the hatchery and see the sturgeon develop and grow. The rest of the summer might be a little more laid-back, but there's much more to come and more adventures to write about. Stay tuned and thanks for reading!! =)

~Kari

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Photos

Adult sturgeon
Photo rights belong to Ryan Hastings

A snake came to help us sample
Photo rights belong to Ryan H.

Masa working on his experiment
Photo rights belong to Ryan H.

Speared sturgeon
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