By Craig Springer, USFWS Lake Texoma lies over the Texas – Oklahoma state line. This boundary water is enormous. Denison Dam backs up the Red and Washita rivers for miles. The swollen arms of several tributary streams form massive lake coves that shoulder into the main water body. Consequently, there is much open water and…
Author: Steve Midway
The Future of the Sportfish Restoration Fund
By Guest blogger, Patrick O’Rourke Few of us in the field of fisheries don’t owe some sort of debt to the Sportfish Restoration (SFR) Fund for where we are today. Whether we grew interested in the field because of resources managed by SFR dollars, completed projects in school funded by SFR, or, like me, got…
Gila Trout: A Native Trout Conservation Story
Plip. That’s the sound of a barbless beadhead nymph falling into a glassy glide of Mineral Creek, a headwater stream of the Gila River in southwest New Mexico. There’s a short drift over a stony run, barely time to mend your line. Then follows that transmutation of fish flesh to your forearm—the taut tug of…
Red Tide
Karenia brevis is the scientific name for a single-celled marine dinoflagellate known for its toxicity, which can manifest in high concentrations as a “red tide.” This dinoflagellate and the red tides that it produces are not new. Ocean waters are home to many dinoflagellates and other types of plankton. The problem arises when populations become…
Reauthorizing the Magnuson Stevens Act
In 1976, Congress passed the Magnuson-Stevens Act (Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act). The Act originally focused on zoning and controlling territorial waters, and establishing regional councils to manage fish stocks, among other things. The Act has been reauthorized a several times and has generally been viewed as a bipartisan success story. Many fish stocks have…
Artifacts of epochs past: Rio Grande cutthroat trout benefit from private lands conservation
By Craig Springer One might say that the past is dead and gone—but that notion doesn’t fly on the Vermejo Park Ranch, near Raton, New Mexico. Managers of this private land seek to restore long reaches of mountain streams for the benefit of native Rio Grande cutthroat trout—not to mention the guided anglers who seek…
NOAA’s Status of Stocks
Last week NOAA Fisheries announced the status of the fish stocks in the US and reported the lowest ever number of stocks on the overfished list. The 2017 Report can be found here. Recalled that the overfished status refers to the biomass of the stock being too low, and the overfishing status refers to the…
Commercial Fisheries of the Great Lakes
When you think about commercial fishing in the US, you probably think about walleye pollock, sardines, and menhaden. What most of us don’t think about are the commercial fisheries that historically and currently take place in the Great Lakes. In the past several decades over 50 species have been represented in the Great Lakes commercial…
The Rise of Fishing Apps
For the past decade, most of us have come to spend a lot of time with our smartphones. We check them first thing in the morning for any overnight messages and then proceed throughout the day swiping every which way through the apps we have let into our lives. And as apps have completely infiltrated our…
Fishery Regulations
Regulations—we hear that word more and more recently, and it means a lot of things to a lot of different people and industries. Fishing—both commercial and recreational—is no different. Fishes are a public resource that if left unregulated would not be the sustainable resource that they can be. Many fisheries do, in fact, suffer from…
To See a Coelacanth
This week’s post reflects on some time I am spending with Prosanta Chakrabarty. Prosanta, myself, and a research team are currently in rural, coastal Tanzania sampling Western Indian Ocean fish
The New GenX: A Tale of Water Pollution
Guest Author: Susanne Brander People in Wilmington, NC have stopped drinking water, from the tap that is, even though we have a water treatment facility, renovated just a few years ago, that boasts of the “latest and most innovative treatment technologies” on its website. Facebook has become dominated by parents exchanging opinions on reverse-osmosis filtration…
Gila Trout Swim Mineral Creek: Devastating fire cleared path for rare trout’s return
Wear and tear on boot soles and a helicopter—that’s what it took to get 1,033 Gila trout safely placed in the remote headwaters of Mineral Creek, well inside the Gila National Forest of southwestern New Mexico. On November 18, 2016, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) working with its partner agencies, the New Mexico…
Top 5 Most Dangerous Sea Creatures
A while back we covered the most venomous fish. And even though we are the Fisheries Blog, we still report on other aquatic critters now and then. Given the interest in our list of venomous fish, we wanted to expand to include other things in the ocean that can ruin your day. We are also not requiring that…
Stormy Forecast for NOAA Budget
By Guest Author Erica Felins, 2017 Knauss Sea Grant Executive Fellow…On Friday night, the Trump Administration released a memo to the Washington Post that shed light on what the future federal budget might look like.
The Fisheries Blog 