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- Feb 28, 2007
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Okay, this is such a fun thread I'd like to post a couple of course pics. Every year I teach a Great Lakes Field Biology course that provides practical applications of fisheries, limnology and aquatic ecology techniques. The course is a 4th year Biology credit at my University. Many of the students taking my course are not all that "wilderness wise". In fact, we have an overnight camping trip each year, and there have been several years where all of this students indicated this was the first time they slept outside of a building!
Well - fortunately, I have student releases on all of these photos so I'll post these pics. The perspective I am trying to give here is the youthful enthusiasm of doing outdoor work. They love it! We fish under an Scientific Collector's license and thus teach them techniques on classic fisheries methods: use of fyke nets, gill nets and seines. These methods are not legal under a sport fisherman's license.
Here I am setting up a fyke net in the Detroit River. A fyke net is like a giant minnow trap.
Students pulling in a seine net. We use these seines for capturing small minnows. One student walkes behind the net draggers with a GPS unit and records the distance of the seine. We then identify all the fish captured. Calculate the volume of water seined (width of wings x depth x distance) to estimate forage fish densities.
A couple of students hauling in a FWIN gill net. These gillnets are standard for fisheries collection units. They consists of 25' foot panels of graded mesh. Staring from 0.5" all the way to 4" mesh. We set them for 8 h and then retrieve them. It is always like christmas - you never know what you will get!
We get all kinds of interesting things!
A nice gar!
On the overnight, we set the net at about 2:00 pm and then check it every 6 h until then next morning at 10:00am to see what is active at different times of the night.
In the second week we turn our attention to Lake Erie
Well, this is a very fun course for me to teach. Most of the students really like it too!
Well - fortunately, I have student releases on all of these photos so I'll post these pics. The perspective I am trying to give here is the youthful enthusiasm of doing outdoor work. They love it! We fish under an Scientific Collector's license and thus teach them techniques on classic fisheries methods: use of fyke nets, gill nets and seines. These methods are not legal under a sport fisherman's license.
Here I am setting up a fyke net in the Detroit River. A fyke net is like a giant minnow trap.
Students pulling in a seine net. We use these seines for capturing small minnows. One student walkes behind the net draggers with a GPS unit and records the distance of the seine. We then identify all the fish captured. Calculate the volume of water seined (width of wings x depth x distance) to estimate forage fish densities.
A couple of students hauling in a FWIN gill net. These gillnets are standard for fisheries collection units. They consists of 25' foot panels of graded mesh. Staring from 0.5" all the way to 4" mesh. We set them for 8 h and then retrieve them. It is always like christmas - you never know what you will get!
We get all kinds of interesting things!
A nice gar!
On the overnight, we set the net at about 2:00 pm and then check it every 6 h until then next morning at 10:00am to see what is active at different times of the night.
In the second week we turn our attention to Lake Erie
Well, this is a very fun course for me to teach. Most of the students really like it too!
) that day, but the late night and pre-dawn is where it's at; that spot was great for night dives.
