The fish!

So this is the real reason I'm up here in Alaska. This year Katy, a fellow grad student, is tagging 1,300 fish with plastic disk tags to see where and when they spawn. So we go out and capture fish (they are silver when they are immature (Jonny and Katy holding a beautiful male), red when they are spawning and mature), stick a tag on them, and walk around on the spawning grounds to find the colored tags again. I'm also looking at scarring rates, from the gillnets used to catch the fish in the fishery. Pretty fun! I'll put up photos of other research projects when we get to them.

The last photos are of a fish "trap" we made, where we put a net on the posts and "herded" the fish into a holding pen, then lift them out, tag them, and send them on their way. We also "seined" fish, by driving a net (pictured as we are mending it) around a school along the river bank, then pulling the net in with the fish and transfering them into a holding box. Also shown are us in a boat, thinking about ways to perfect the trap, then us tagging and fish with tags in them. Also shown are two pink salmon (aka "humpies," different species than sockeye).