(Orleans)– The Iowa Department of Natural Resources is reintroducing paddle fish to the Iowa Great Lakes. Mike Hawkins, a fisheries biologist with the DNR, tells KUOO news the young paddle fish are being brought to the area from the state fish hatchery at Lake Rathbun…
“They are a wild strain of paddle fish from the Missouri River basin, so they would have been native to the Missouri River basin which is part of what the Iowa Great Lakes is, it flows into that Missouri River basin, so. These historic populations would have been here natively. We have good record of them being here in the early 1900’s. The last record of one caught in the Iowa Great Lakes is actually 1919, and then some really large individuals that were caught prior to that that would be or maybe exceed the current world record for paddle fish. So we know they’ll grow really big here.”
Hawkins says paddle fish have some rather unique features…
“They don’t have teeth, they’re a filter feeder. They have this really cool look to them, they have this really long paddle for a nose called a rostrum which actually has sensory pores all over it where they can detect electrical signals in the water that are given off by these schools of zoplankton that they can then feed. So they have this big gaping mouth with large gill breakers that are specially evolved to filter out plankton in the water.”
Hawkins says restocking paddle fish in the Iowa Great Lakes will need to be done on a regular basis…
“The dams on the Little Sioux River kind of stop their ability to migrate up. They won’t reproduce in the lake, they’re more river reproducers so they have to have these large tributary rivers of the Missouri that they reproduce in. And there’s been a lot of paddle fish work going on in the country in the Mississippi and the Missouri basins. A lot of recovery work, restocking, reintroductions and so this is part of that. It’s a great success story for the species that is really a living fossil. They’re a cartilagiousness bone structure, and the recovery of the paddle fish populations has been a great success story and this is kind of a cool moment to be able to reintroduce them back to the lakes.”
Hawkins says they’re waiting for water temperatures in the Iowa Great Lakes to drop a bit before transporting the fish.
He made the announcement during Saturday’s Okoboji Blue Water Festival.
