Anglers catch fish for science and to save a species ...
“There she is, there she is, Fish on, fish on,” shouted Chuck Manny as a huge striped bass began to peel line off of a reel off the coast of northern New Jersey.
Manny is an angler, one of the top striped bass sportfishermen around, but in this case, his fish-catching efforts are all in the name of science. Every striped bass Manny and the people on his boat catch, is tagged and tracked for research.
Manny is one of thousands of charter captains and anglers who tag fish through a research program run by Gray Fish Tag Research.
“We tag and we research fish migrations,” said Roxanne Wilmer of Gray Fish Tag Research. “We work with charter captains all around the world, so we have about 10-thousand charter captains we work with. What they do as they’re releasing fish, they’re tagging them with our tags.”
Gray uses two types of tags. One is a “spaghetti” tag; a thin green tube with a tag number on one side and a phone number and web address for Gray on the other. Anglers who catch a fish with those tags are asked to call the number or visit the website to report it. That way researchers can track the movement of where the fish was caught the first time and then every time after. Knowing those migrations is vital to understanding fish behavior. It is not uncommon to find a fish tagged in Virginia or Maryland several months later off the coast of New York or Massachusetts.
The other type of tag is a satellite tag. It stays on the fish for six months collecting data on movement, depth, and water temperature. After six months, it detaches on its own and floats to the surface where the data is uploaded to a satellite. That data is collected by Gray. Thought to stay primarily coastal, those satellite tags have found striped bass range farther out into the Atlantic Ocean than previously thought.
https://www.wric.com/news/nature-and-outdoors/anglers-catch-fish-for-science-and-to-save-a-species-vital-to-every-state-on-the-atlantic-coast/
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