New Article: Electrofishing: When And Why To Do It

[Glenn]

Electrofishing is the most common method fisheries biologists use to get as close to a random sample as possible in freshwater lakes and ponds. Here's all you need to know about it.

 

https://www.bassresource.com/fish_biology/electrofishing-why.html

 

[Munkin]

I need one of those for my boat. 

 

Allen 

[Swamp Girl]

13 hours ago, Munkin said:

I need one of those for my boat. 

 

Allen 

 

I have one of those in my canoe, which explains my consistency. 

[gim]

I did this a bunch of times in college.  Both in a boat on the Mississippi and using a stream backpack electrofisher for trout population estimates.

 

Fascinating the array of fish that you come across, even in a small trout stream.  I would estimate that 90% of the fish we sampled in the river were rough or "junk" fish though - carp, bullheads, suckers, rock bass, etc.

[king fisher]

If I bought one of these would it get the Bait Monkey off of my back?  Probably not, I would still get skunked and the monkey would be trying to get me to buy a new electroshock device in a different color.

[TnRiver46]

I used to do a lot of electrofishing as well, mostly for the national park service. Hiking Honda generators and neoprene waders several miles thru the backcountry up to 3,000-5,000 feet was loads of fun 🤣. It was actually not as bad as the 6 gallon water packs filled with trout, those were very sloshy. A few people fell into the water while we were shocking and rode the lightning haha. Another crazy memory I have from that is when we shocked a water snake, the thing went wild 

 

our shocking was for native southern Appalachian brook trout, not a random sample. We conducted 3 pass depletions with block nets on either end of 100m stretches of water and compared it to previous years data. Also the brook trout is one of the only fish that inhabits these tiny streams that were usually no more than 6 feet wide. We occasionally found longnose dace, black nose dace, and non native rainbow trout in the lower elevations but it was only brook trout up top 

[gim]

10 minutes ago, TnRiver46 said:

Hiking Honda generators and neoprene waders several miles thru the backcountry up to 3,000-5,000 feet was loads of fun

 

I can only imagine.  I put the back pack electrofisher on once in a trout stream and it nearly turned me into an anchor.

 

They are very effective at stunning fish though.  I can confirm that.

[TnRiver46]

6 minutes ago, gimruis said:

 

I can only imagine.  I put the back pack electrofisher on once in a trout stream and it nearly turned me into an anchor.

 

They are very effective at stunning fish though.  I can confirm that.

The park service allowed us to use a team of mules to access one extremely remote area, we had to stay up there for a week so we loaded the mules down with massive igloo coolers full of our food. Still had to carry the darn generators, and had to chase bears away from the coolers every night 

[GRiver]

I got to witness this one time, I was driving along my favorite smallie  river. Setting up to do electrofishing, I stopped they let me watch and get educated. I was amazed at the fish I didn’t know lived in the river. I meet an old timer who had been doing that river for a while and we talked about the different fish populations he had seen rise and fall.

It was a informative experience that stumbled upon.

[Big Hands]

Back in the early 90's when Castaic was in it's prime, the local lake volunteer group said the DFG was looking for a volunteer that is familiar with lake to go out with them at night on their electro-shocking boat. I couldn't raise my hand fast enough to put it mildly.

 

They also put me to work manning one of the foot pedals (they use two so one person cannot accidentally energize the booms) and the net. We shocked up several different species and brought them aboard so they could weigh them and take scale samples. 

 

Toward the end of the night we went quite a ways back in a cove we call Dry Gulch and shocked up a Castaic Teeny-bopper. The net they had was super shallow, kinda like the net they use at the bait barges in the harbors to give you a "scoop" of anchovies. Well, once I scooped her out of the water, she snapped out of her stupor and used that shallow net like a springboard to escape. The crew of biologists said they had never shocked up one of that size before.

 

It was a fun night and interesting to see their process, but I wished we could have brought that toad on board.

[Bankbeater]

I've seen the MO. Conservation Dept. do this a few times on some of their lakes.  They take a sample of predators vs. forage.  If the numbers are off they will move some of the predator fish to lakes that have higher amounts of bait fish.