From The MDC Biologist

Hey gang, I received this email from the MDC biologist, Jen Girondo, who works the central Missouri area. She has some interesting things to pass along to us. I asked her about stocking of browns in the Meramec river, the telemetry program to follow the brown trout movement in the river, and if she could speak at our annual charity dinner. Here is her response.

Hi Kenny – good to hear from you and that the FATC is doing well.

Some answers to your questions:
Yes, browns from Shepherd of the Hills were stocked recently. They are the main producer of browns for all of MO, and there is a standing order that if Meramec doesn’t produce all the browns needed for the Red Ribbon area, that Shepherd would provide the needed fish. We were short browns from Meramec this year and Shepherd filled the rest of the request. They were stocked the same way we stock all of our browns – at several point locations throughout the cold water area.

Yes, we will have multiple fall-winter stockings as we did last year. The timing depends on fish & equipment availability, weather, and hatchery staff schedules. Approximately 2000-3000 browns will be stocked each time and we do try to spread them out through the winter months. Some will be marked as in the past, but not all. A volunteer or two could help with the tagging; the process is pretty tedious and we don’t have the ability to accommodate a large number of volunteers and keep quality control high. I can let you know with as much lead time as possible, but as with our stocking, it will largely depend on weather and staff availability, so I might only be able to give you a day or 2 notice of when it will happen. The volunteers would need to be steady handed and have good eyesight, and able to stand or sit outside at the tagging table for several hours.

The pilot telemetry project is wrapping up, so no additional help needed at this point. Unfortunately, we lost track of most of the fish after the big flood. (We did not “hear” any go upstream or downstream during that time, but some did move downstream during smaller rises pre and post flood.) However, almost half of the fish had not been “heard” from previous to the flood. We are unsure if they left the system (natural mortality, harvest or predation), if our equipment wasn’t able to “hear” them as they hid under cover, or if there was another reason we couldn’t locate them (batteries died?). This was a pilot project, and obviously didn’t answer all of our management questions; we did figure out some of the pros and cons of using the acoustic equipment and that we could successfully locate fish to an extent. We are in discussions as to whether or not we’ll continue pursuing this type of information in light of other statewide research needs.

You’ll also probably be interested to know that in our fall sample, we did see several more browns surviving than in recent years (the number is still low compared to the “glory days” of the 1990s). Several browns were 18”+ in length. Most were fish we had stocked in fall/winter 2016-2017, but some were from the previous year. Rainbow numbers were low compared to past years. I didn’t expect to see as many browns as we did with the flooding that we had, but I’m hopeful that what we saw was browns being able to survive flooding and stay “home” after adjusting to the river for a while before the flood.

I wouldn’t be available Jan. 22 or 29, as we have other projects scheduled at that time. If it works out for one of the other Mondays, I could probably come up and speak. (Just to clarify the “project” you’re referring to is the telemetry project? Tagging and/or stocking adjustments? Overall status of the Red Ribbon area? Those are the areas I typically cover, but I wasn’t sure if there was a specific topic you were thinking of) I’ll let Wes speak to his availability, and topics he’d be comfortable presenting on.

Thanks for touching base with the Meramec trout!

Jen

Jennifer Girondo
Fisheries Management Biologist
MO Department of Conservation
3220 Hwy 185 South
Sullivan, MO 63080
Jen.girondo@mdc.mo.gov