Fish Tagging at the Kuparuk River

On Saturday I decided to tag along with Elissa and her assistants to the Kuparuk River to tag grayling fish. It was another beautiful day (we've had a fair few of these this week!) and I really didn't want to get stuck inside mixing reagents all day. We all trudged out in the tundra a few kilometers from the road to a deep section of the river to fish. Elissa and Max used fly rods and Aleah and I used the reel lines. Everyone had pretty good success catching fish (except for me that is). At the very end of the day, I hooked two fish, both of which sadly got away. However, together, the other three had around 8 fish to tag. After watching Max and Aleah tag a few fish, I gave it a try myself. I just felt really badly for the fish we tagged, but I decided to go ahead and learn the process. The fish were put in a bucket that had some chemicals in it to knock them out. Each fish was then weighed, measured, and then tagged. To tag the fish, we first used a scalpal to slice a shallow hole on the fish's ventral side just above the fins (pic left: Max tagging a fish). Then we had a large syringe that contained the electromagnetic tag in in. Each cylindrical tag is the diameter of a pill and around 2 cm long. To tag the fish, we inserted the syringe tip about 1 cm in the slit we made and depressed the plunger to insert the tag.

We returned the fish to shallow calm water for them to recover and wake up from the drugs. Gradually they would become responsive and swim away. Elissa uses the tagged fish to study the grayling migratory patterns. She has tagged fish at various points from the headwaters of the river to further down stream to track when the tagged fish pass underneath an antennae she set up downstream.

Max moving the grayling though the water to get fresh water into the fish's gills speeding the recovery process.

A recovering grayling post tagging