The Catch
The Catch — A recent shot of USGS Lake Ontario Biological Station engineer Ted Strang and biologist Dr. Brian Weidel with an adult lake sturgeon collected near Olcott, New York.
The USGS Lake Ontario Biological Station completed their 2015 spring prey fish assessment on May 11, 2015. The assessment is an annual collaboration with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to assess alewife and rainbow smelt populations in the U.S. waters of Lake Ontario. This year the assessment team joined forces with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry to also complete two cross-lake daytime hydroacoustic surveys to evaluate geographic distribution of alewife in both U.S. and Canadian waters. During the assessment, the team collected multiple native species that are the focus of restoration efforts in Lake Ontario, including: five adult lake sturgeon, one lake trout, and one small coregonine (member of the whitefishes group) that is pending identification to determine if it is a deepwater cisco (bloater) stocked by the USGS Great Lakes Science Center during fall 2014. Biologists from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Lamar Fish Health Center and a graduate student from the University of Toledo collected fish samples during the cruise to test for fish diseases. Original public domain image from Flickr