MNDNR Metro Catfish Project

[MDNRMetroRivers]

Greetings everyone. I figured I had better get moving on getting the word out about the MNDNR Metro Catfish Project that will be continuing this year. For those of you that don't know, we put a short survey online (www.surveymonkey.com/catfish) to begin to gather some information and see if catfish anglers would be willing to participate in keeping a catfish diary. If you have already taken the survey, thank you. If you have not taken the survey, I encourage you to take it. It should only take a few minutes to complete.

We plan to continue tagging both channel and flathead catfish this year and is geared towards the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area. There are many things we are trying to find out with this project and the associated catfish diaries, but we can learn so much more about managing catfish if we can get anglers to participate in keeping these diaries. I know some of you have already been keeping your own data over the years. This is an attempt to learn from such detailed information.

I don't know how many anglers kept diaries last year. We had many minor problems that likely resulted in very few diaries being kept. If you did keep a diary last year, you can e-mail the file to me at [email protected] or you can contact me at that e-mail address to get a mailing address. Also, if you did already indicate that you were going to participate last year (or if you were planning to and didn't), I will have your contact information and will be sending out messages to those people soon.

I would still like to host a meeting sometime soon (thinking a Saturday afternoon in St Paul) to discuss this project as well as other catfish activities that we have been working on recently. I know there was some concern over providing detailed locations of tagged fish caught as well as some other concerns. The tagging project is scheduled to continue into 2012 and the tags will likely be retained for a long time. Having passionate anglers out there recording their catfishing efforts and providing details on tagged fish caught would greatly help us improve our knowledge of this growing sport.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Joel Stiras

Metro Catfish Project Lead

[Scott K]

Welcome Joel! Looking forward to helping out anyway I can.

[bobbymalone]

I participated last year and sent my catfish journal in around october. I will do the same again this year.

It's really not that hard to jot down or, like I do, send yourself a text message with species, time, length and GPS location or river mile. Especially since catfishing is usually not a fast and furious sunnies off the dock kind of action.

Hopefully some of the big time cat guys here will get on board this year after last years naysaying.

If you value the resource, why not take a few minutes of your time to contribute to its study?

[Scott K]

I would love to get involved this year, but it is just outside of my normal fishing area.

A few questions I have are, for those of us that fish for big fish, would we bias your studies? By that I mean, I fish with bait for big fish, so I very seldom catch small fish. I have fished cats many years, I have known spots that mostly, only big ones are at. Also, if I happen to catch a few small ones in one area, I move, to find bigger ones.

One other thing, I fish a quite a bit, and I usually dont waste my time measuring anything less then 25 pounds, and I am assuming you would want measurements of all fish caught, correct?

[MDNRMetroRivers]

4wanderingeyes, might be just outside of your normal area, but if you're willing to keep the data, we're glad to have it.

Yes and no on the bias, trophy fishermen would not necessarily bias the results. I am already expecting a bias, but unsure which ones would come true. Creel surveys are based on entire populations of anglers, right down to little kids. If this project has enough steam with anglers, we will be able to show trends over time.

We are looking for lengths of all fish caught (to nearest half inch), want effort info (even the 8 hour nights when no fish are caught), harvest/release info, and tag numbers and locations of caught tagged fish.

[DTro]

I'm going to make an effort to help out however I can this year.

It seemed to have hit my inbox a little to late last year.

To be honest, I'm kind of afraid to see how many hours that I fish.

Thanks Joel

[Loose]

I will also take part in this, some of them might be out of the desired range cause I plan on fishing ALOT of the Minnesota this year.

[harvey lee]

More than happy to help out in any way I can.

[MDNRMetroRivers]

FYI, I'm hoping to send out e-mails today to confirm who is in and who is out and who can receive my messages when I blind copy a large list. Be sure to add [email protected] to your SAFE list to receive my emails and attachments. Might want to check your Junk Mail folders to see if my message ends up there.