(Orleans)– Crews with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources are conducting their annual seine counts in the Iowa Great Lakes. The counts have taken place for decades and are typically held this time of year. Mike Hawkins, a fisheries biologist, says it gives them a good handle on fish populations and conditions…
“It’s a 500 foot seine that we use to encircle an area near the shoreline. We pull the seine through the native plants and we seep all of the young of the year fish out of there. So young of the year are fish that were spawned this spring. And we’re looking at just trend information. We’ve been doing this around 50 years and we have some really interesting trends on different populations of fish in the Iowa Great Lakes.”
Hawkins tells news partner KTIV they’ve been seeing an increase in recent years in the numbers of pumpkinseed sunfish…
“Pumpkinseed fish specialize on eating like snails. And with the zebra mussel populations acting kind of like a snail population in the lake, or shaped like a snail, we’ve seen a lot more pumpkinseed numbers over the past few years and they may even be responsible for controlling some of the population.”
The seine count started earlier this week on Big Spirit Lake.
