Tracking Browns in the red ribbon area of the Meramec,

I found this on the Ozark Anglers site. The discussion started about the area of Cardiac Hill.

We are in the middle of tracking browns right now on the Meramec Red Ribbon section near St. James:
We released the transmitter-ed fish roughly a month ago.  We started with 26 browns that seemed to do well for the first week, but over the next several weeks detected 15 tags that are displaying a mortality signal.  We are finding these “dead” fish in the red ribbon section (all that’s left when we find it is the bare tag, the fish carcass is gone), which would indicate they are not being harvested (illegally and/or unintentionally) by anglers either in the park or in the red ribbon section. They are “staying put”, but dying rather quickly. We are detecting some small movements, to the adjacent riffle/pool up or down stream as they seem to explore their surroundings and find a suitable resting/feeding stations.
After recovering several “chewed on” tags, natural predation (otters, eagles) is thought to be the big source of mortality at this point, but without being able to find carcasses it is a little hard to tell if something had weakened the fish first to make them more susceptible to predation, or if the timing of the stocking when other prey (i.e. crayfish) are going dormant and/or spawning instincts are kicking in has exacerbated the effects of predation.
We do have 9 browns still swimming as of last Friday. We have another round of tags that will go in fish and be released in December/January to try to shed some additional light on what the stocked fish/experience.  (in addition to the tagged fish, several hundred other un-tagged browns were stocked according to usual protocols.)
(If you were referring to the pilot study we did in 2017… the results were a little harder to tease apart since we used different technology which limited how well we could detect a fish.  In a nutshell, we released fish in January of 2017; by the big flood in April/May most were not detected anymore.  A small number went into the spring branch/park and were lost.  We did detect some small movements during small rises.  Those tags did not send out a “mortality” signal, and were not able to be tracked out of the water, so it limited what we could interpret when a tag was not heard anymore.)

Doug – would sending updates twice a month suffice? I was thinking you could share with whomever is interested. One thing to keep in mind is that each week we seem to learn/discover some new aspect that sheds light on what’s happening, so interpretation of the results could change in the next week or two… I will take the time to digest all in the info from the whole study before making adjustments to stocking and/or other management, and share a summary of the findings when it’s complete.

Jen

Bill