Well, I guess, why don't you start
with kind of explaining what
it is that the, why this
lake was a good choice as
a, as a not one that's generally
accessible to the public
for the experiment that you guys are
running.
For the experiment that we're
running here, which is overall
the objective is,
does adding trees or of
course woody habitat to a lake
increase fish community productivity
or the carrying capacity of the
lake?
And there's not, even though there's
thousands of lakes up here, there's
a lot of lakes where we can do a
manipulation or experiment at that
sort of scale.
Also in the absence, as we look
around the lake today, there is no
development. This is the minor
footprint of any development on the
lake in its entirety so we can
truly understand how the
fish community responds to that
manipulation in the absence of
things like high fishing pressure,
invasive species, lake shore
residential development, excess
nutrient loading, all those things.
So it was really ideal.
It was ideal because it's a
manageable lake size.
It's about 90 acres, this lake
here.
In addition to that,
we've really only studied kind
of woody habitat dynamics in
relatively simple fish communities.
Largemouth bass and yellow perch
or largemouth Bass and bluegill.
This lake has a pretty
species-diverse fish community
for a small lake, so we've got
naturally producing musculine,
smallmouth bass, walleye, largemouth
bass.
As far as the panfish, yellow perch,
rock bass, bluegill, pumpkin seed,
green sunfish, and hybrids of those
species.
There's some white sucker in here,
there's very few crappie, so it's a
very diverse fish community.
We can understand a little bit
more than just bass and bluegills
and bass and yellow perch about how.
The fish community or more diverse
fish community might respond to
these sorts of manipulations.
So why don't you take us around
and show us some good examples of
what it's like.
So we started the experiment out
here in 2015,
and often when we do, or generally
always with whole lake experiments,
what we should be doing is we should
have a treatment and
a reference system.
So our reference system for this
lake is Escanaba Lake.
And in 2015 to 2018,
we essentially came out here every
spring and sampled the fish
community and got to understand
the limnological conditions,
the riparian zone conditions.
So for three years, we just wanted
to get a baseline.
What was, how was this lake
behaving, so to speak?
Is it's fish community?
Is it water quality and other
aspects that we were interested
in might be influenced by a whole
lake addition of woody habitat.
And in 2018, in the summer of
2018, these are some
of the trees that were dropped at
that point. So you can see the
needles are no longer on the trees
anymore, but they're still
maintaining a pretty high branching
complexity.
Even after after
seven years of being in this lake,
ice conditions, but the bark
is starting to be gone now.
But again those very smallest
branches seem to be holding on, the
needles are gone.
It's early in the season yet if this
was about a month from now you'd
see or algae growth
on these trees that we
dropped in 2018.
If we get up close, maybe not right
now, but in the summertime, you'll
see small bluegills and other fish
that are all inside that refuge
area. You might see some of the
larger predatory or piscivorous
fish-eating fish, musky
bass, using the outside edges of
them. In a couple weeks here,
we might see smallmouth bass and
largemouth bass nesting in
association with that wood.
So this was the initial phase
of the experiment, or phase one,
where we dropped 140 trees
all along the North Shore.
Of the lake here.
And we did it in kind of bundles and
complexes as you can see.
We got a couple there and we're just
kind of opportunistic with the
sizes.
And then we dropped trees
commensurate with what the forest
is. It was about 87 percent
conifers,
13 percent deciduous trees,
mostly maples.
So that was the first phase of the
project and then we monitor
it. You know, what happened to the
fish community? What happened to the
limnology of the Lake in
that first five, six,
seven years?
Actually, we monitor for six years
is what it ended up being because we
missed a year with COVID with field
sections.
Or is that more electroshock?
So both.
So when we sample the fish
community, we do surveys out
here just like we do on a lot of our
other lakes. We'll FIKE net it for
usually out here for about a month
to get through all the species.
We get mark recapture population
estimates on all the major species
in here.
And then through the collection of
aging material from those fish
and the population estimates, we can
measure production.
So fish production of the fish the
community and production is a
rate. So it's for
scientific terms, it's kilograms per
hectare per year.
English units would be pounds per
acre per year, and so it's
a rate of the productive capacity
of an individual species.
And what we found, we've just
submitted this paper for publication
to Fisheries Magazine,
which is an American Fisheries
Society publication,
is that in six
years, post-coast
woody habitat addition of those 140
trees, we've doubled the fish
community production of Samford
Lake here.
What mostly happened is what we
hypothesize would happen is
every one of these trees is setting
up a micro ecosystem within this
larger ecosystem.
So that tree drops in, it slowly
starts to degrade, that periphyte
grows on it, that algae, that
healthy algae.
That attracts benthic
macroinvertebrates, that attracts
the small fishes that eat those,
and eventually that's to translate
up into the upper trophic levels,
into the musky, into the bass,
and into the walleye.
So in this phase of the experiment
right now, most of that production
is all locked up in those lower
trophic level forage fishes.
So major increases in production in
yellow perch, bluegill, and rock
bass as a response
to the experiment.
And we'll continue to monitor it as
we get farther down the lake here.
Phase two of the project was
to drop trees on
the entire western shoreline of
the lake. And so we really loaded
it up this last time.
And added, and we'll see this when
we get down to shore, we added 240
more trees to this
lake in
early November this past fall.
And the reason we're doing this and
staggering it is we want to find out
or we want a test whether there's
a point where fish production
basically caps out and saturates.
So is there a point were you
know you don't get the benefit of
adding the wood anymore for fish
production. You see some of the
para-fighting there?
That's also freshwater sponge,
which is kind of neat.
The other reason that we are
staggering these
tree drops in the lake is eventually
we'll have a third phase where we do
the rest of the lake, the entire
southern shore.
We're staggering it because most
of the lakes in northern Wisconsin
or almost anywhere, there's not
going to be this amount of
area to put trees into.
So it'd be good to know if there is
a saturating point and we get the
question of how many trees should we
add to get this sort of response or
what type of
We should be able to answer some of
those questions, so again,
everything we're trying to do here
is applied so that what we
learn here can be taken on the
landscape for the greater good of
lakes based on what we observe here.
Yeah, so have you determined if
there's a difference between
dropping a conifer versus a
deciduous tree?
Not a difference per se,
it's only going to be, or what we
do know is it's going to be in
longevity of how long that wood is
going to last.
And so everything we've dropped in
here is either a hardwood or
a conifer and they last a long
time compared to something like a
birch or an aspen in our softer
woods.
They also have to maintain their
branching complexity a bit better.
But like the conifers, you know, if
we were to take a chainsaw to that
one right there and we cut into
that, that sap would smell as fresh
as cutting that tree down.
In the wood. It doesn't degrade
very rapidly at all, especially
those that are under water.
So it's a long process.
They've done some dendrology on
woody habitat in lakes and some
Ontario lakes, and some of those
pieces of wood had been in the lake
for 500, 550 years.
It's very long-lived.
Another reason for doing the
experiment out here, though, is that
there was a lot of woody habitats
in this lake, but it was all highly
degraded and contributing
to the system.
So to speak anymore and
so this was kind of a pulse
of new
coarse woody habitat, new carbon
that's going to slowly enter this
system and
then as we've shown so far
it's made its way into the food web
and increased fish production.
There's a difference between someone
who will put logs out
on the ice in the middle of the lake
versus dropping a tree on the edge
of it.
So we've had a lot of conversations
about that and some research.
And so formally within
Wisconsin DNR, you know,
we fill out permits for Cribs,
fish cribs, which is more of what
you're talking about, Zach, where
we're going to go on to some deeper
water. It's not going to be a
navigational hazard.
We're going kind of sunk a log cabin
or a complex of trees.
We've gotten away from that as an
agency. We still have that permit
and we still allow it.
But we've gone more towards fish
sticks and tree drops, which this is
Because that simulates the natural
environment of what would happen.
That pine tree right there,
you know, when that dies it has 360
degrees to fall and about 180 of
them would be associated with the
lake. That's the natural process
we're trying to simulate with this.
What we did here was by request of
the group that we're working with,
they wanted us to specifically do
tree drops.
Another thing that we promote that's
probably even better than tree drops
is if possible go
cut wood in an upland forest that's
away from the lakes. You leave all
the riparian habitat to fall
in. Bring that onto the ice in the
winter and distribute it like this
and that's what we call our fish
sticks program that Scott Toshner
started oh at least
ten years ago now in northwestern
Wisconsin based out of the Hayward
and Brule area.
So I guess that's, I mean, obviously
there's an advantage to having a
private lake that you can do this on
where it is more of a controlled
experiment. Yeah.
But if we're going to expand this to
public lakes that are developed,
they don't have trees left, but they
can still possibly get there by
fish sticks.
And that's exactly what we're doing.
So, you know, as an agency,
we prefer to
have the riparian zone intact.
There's all kinds of benefits to
having that riparian forest from,
you know nutrients, preventing
nutrients from getting in the lake.
Some, you water kind of
purification, clarification sorts of
purposes.
So those runoff effects, but then
also having that leaf litter that
naturally falls in the Lake, breaks
down and gets incorporated into the
food web, as well as just the woody
habitat that might naturally fall in
through. Storm event or senescence
or a beaver dropping it into the
lake.
So that's exactly what we'd, you
know, promote in those sorts of
situations is that we want,
we've signed that permit but
we want you to bring it from upland
sources, drag it onto the lake in
winter and distribute it.
We were on Lake Namacoggin,
with Mike DeAndrea,
and he said they've dropped a number
on a one undeveloped
section of shoreline.
So when, when, how fast do they see
results?
So I'd say relatively quickly
depending on what the response is
and so in general
as soon as you drop these trees
they'll become fish attracting
structure really rapidly especially
for the small fishes and then
the larger fishes will often set up
ambush points on the edges of
it. Then within a couple years
you're going to start to see the
degradation of the tree bark,
the pine needles falling off and
things like that.
That's where you start to get You're
para-fighting through that
degradation and those release of
nutrients.
The background vertebrates quickly
respond to that and then, like I
said, the micro-ecosystem now the
fish progression starts.
So it happens pretty rapidly, you
know, once these are implemented.
Another question we get about this,
you now, I talk about periphyton and
it's kind of a healthy, naturally
algae.
One of the other questions that we
answered in this experiment is we've
heard a number of times,
like, well, if we add trees to our
lake, that's going to...
Make the water less clear,
because of the nutrients that are in
the system now, it's going to lead
to harmful algal blooms and
it's just going to change our water
quality in general so we're not in
favor of it.
We just published a paper recently
that basically what we did out
here changed none of those
variables.
It didn't change anything
meaningful. Chlorophyll A went up a
tiny bit, but it didn't
make any difference with second this
transparency or water clarity
in this lake.
And so that was, I think, a good,
again, one of those demonstration
experiments like I talked about.
Until you do it and you measure it
and get it out there and are able to
talk about it, people may be
reluctant to do something that's
quite beneficial for a lake.
There's a lot of conventional
wisdom that you have
to overcome in a lot of these
places where people this is why
we've always done it this is what
we've always assumed how
hard is it to I mean can one study
penetrate some of that or does it
have to be a study that then shows
it like they have to feel it
themselves
I think a little bit of both.
I mean, like I said, I think the
demonstration science helps a lot,
but it's also the outreach then,
right? And so as an agency
we spend a lot of time working with
lake associations and anglers and
fishing clubs to
take the science that's
out here that we're looking at right
now and the research we're looking
at, right now, and the results and
taking it out into the public and
having those conversations and
showing those things and talking
about it, and
so I think that's one of our
greatest tools.
That we have for some of those
transformative changes or policy
changes and then like I said I
think often times there's a lot of,
it can be very contagious and
so you get a lake association or
someone that sees
the results, they understand the
results and then it becomes they're
promoting it and it propagates from
there.
So I think a lot of that is where
you know big progress comes from
these sorts of things.
So you see all the freshwater sponge
that's growing?
So that's been a really... That's
the green stuff that's down there?
Yep, yep. So this kind of green
wavy sort
of stalks there, that's freshwater
sponge.
And that was a pretty big response.
A lot of periphyton, but a lot of
freshwater sponge on most of these
trees.
Are we able to kind of go
into them and
Ethan's got the GoPro we can kind of
put that down the water
I'm going to take you to one of our
biggest ones down here.
We got a huge hemlock that we
dropped. And maybe that'll be a neat
one.
That one was so loud when it hit the
water, it like cut out the audio on
my video camera.
It just like went blank for a second
when I hit the water.
And we've left a couple areas in
here by the club's
request, like this one not to drop
trees here.
There is some walleye spawning that
goes on in here.
But for the most part, we added a
lot of trees and we're going to go
along the western shoreline here,
which we did last fall.
Take a look.
All the work that we're doing out
here, we're a lot behavioral work
with fish to see how they respond to
this. So we have musky
smallmouth, largemouth,
and walleye that have radio
transmitters in them.
So we find where
they are in the lake every two
weeks.
We've had what are called pit tag
receivers out here, so your pit tag
is... The same as like a microchip
that you might put into a pet that
gets lost and you can find it.
We put a lot of those into fish and
we had receivers out here that were
tracking fish movements in relation
to the new habitat constantly
basically.
Anytime they passed over those
antennae they would get picked
up and we get that information.
A former master student of mine
worked on that aspect of the project
out here.
And they found that they were coming
into it more.
It's been very interesting.
So there was definitely some early
attraction to the structure, but
then we started to see more offshore
movement and just movement in
general.
And we think, based
on the literature and those
results, what we're seeing is that
we probably created so much good
refuge habitat in here that
it didn't become good foraging
habitat anymore.
You can hit that point, and it's
another reason of doing the
experiment of how much is too much
where you start to imbalance things
in the other way.
Because we know this with aquatic
weeds and with some woody
habitat studies.
Went up and in other studies we
found that their activity costs for
the predators went down because it
would just stay in association with
the habitat.
It's been seven years and we can
see.
If you look into the water, all the
branching complexity that's still
remaining in habitat that
that's creating for small fish.
And I'll also note, these woody
habitat additions are not just for
fish.
This is basking habitat for turtles.
In the right situation, a loon may
build its nest on a floating log
in a right situation.
You see blue herons perched on
them and fishing.
So there's a lot of different
benefits.
A yellow perch lay their eggs.
Their egg ribbons will be draped
across this coarse woody habitat.
Same thing for frogs and toads
and our amphibians.
They use this habitat too.
Yeah, the number of
tadpoles, massive tadpols,
was incredible.
And that's not even many.
In some years out here, we're dip
netting out five gallon buckets
full of tadpoles.
And what I've understood over the
years here, I'm pretty sure they're
green frogs. And what happens is
that they get these banner tadpole
years where everything's right.
And there's so many of them that
they actually, it becomes a
rhinovirus die off.
So we've seen it on Escanaba for
sure. I think it's seen it here.
So as they start to emerge from
tadpols to become frogs.
Right at that stage, that rhinovirus
kind of hits and knocks those
densities down, and so you'll see a
lot of dead tadpoles that
are going through metamorphosis.
I just realized Green Frog got that
big.
Yeah, the tadpoles, I think they're
a pretty good size.
These tadpols are in the water for
at least two years, so a lot of the
ones in here in Escanaba, they're
getting their legs right now.
So we're just ending the first phase
of the woody habitat edition right
now. Again, that was in
June of 2018 that we dropped those
trees along the North shoreline.
And then we started phase two
this past fall
in early November of
2024, where now
we're on the Western shoreline of
the lake.
And I came out here with a
forester and took a look
opportunistically at what trees
would make sense species
wise.
To drop in and
now we're seeing trees
that have been dropped in
wherever we're at six months ago
now and have just gone through their
first winter.
You can see there's a little
discoloration on some of the
pine needles there but we still have
some green underneath and
again we were pretty optimistic of
trying to put the trees in bundles
creating a lot of habitat to
continue to see how it influences.
The fish community production of the
lake and other aspects of the
aquatic ecosystem out here.
We worked with some amazing lagers
that did this.
How long do you think it took to
drop 240 trees into the shoreline
of Lake with two guys?
Walking with the chainsaw.
Three hours.
We started about 9.30, and we were
eating lunch at 1.
And they took a couple breaks.
It was a little bit warmer that day.
And I sort of understand it.
I was like, guys, by all means, I'll
take your time.
And they didn't want to go back to
the shop to grease equipment and
stuff like that.
And it was just
amazing to watch your professional
work
in that aspect.
I wish I had the same level of
confidence.
Sick.
Just guys, this is absolutely
incredible what you're doing.
This is amazing.
They're like, this is the cherry of
cherry jobs we get.
We're not trying to lift a
huge tree that's sitting over
somebody's garage.
With this lift, this pulley system,
he's like, we're just dropping trees.
He's like this is great.
I figured it would take longer than
that just to walk.
Said three hours and
they probably took at least
they took two they took like
a 10 minute break and they took a 20
minute break
And it's literally just zip, zip,
boom, zip zip boom.
So is the bike net in here
deliberately trying to see what
comes into these shorelines?
It's more opportunistically.
We typically set them in slightly
different areas, but now
that there's so much wood on this
side of the lake it's harder to get
to some of the place we wanted to.
So Taylor, she's the
one Taylor and Dylan set it this
year, so they just set it more
opportunistic to get good coverage
of the Lake where we
know there's decent walleye spawning
habitat.
Because our nets out here, they've
got good coverage throughout the
lake and we're getting all species,
but at least early on we're
targeting walleye spawning
habitat.
So what is the walleye
per acre?
Out here, it started at
about three adults per acre in
2015.
Like many of the lakes up here,
especially the smaller ones, we've
seen that slightly decline over
time.
We've written about this.
We can't say that it's because of
the tree drops causing it because
it's been a systemic pattern
up here at that same time where
small lakes and walleye recruitment
seem to go down.
We've seen.
An uptick of largemouth bass out
here afterwards, but that's often
what happens in other places.
So our note to those
interested in this practice for
fish habitat purposes is
probably to be precautionary in
walleye lakes and certainly not
unknown walleye spawning
locations within a lake.
This lake probably did not
originally have walleye.
It was stocked by the club in
the 70s.
It was natural reproducing.
Again, as we talked about this
morning, some of that fades away
over time, where this lake
is, it's got very limited
walleye spawning habitat, very
limited.
And in fact, I can't even tell you
exactly where they spawn in here.
I could go out in Escanaba and point
out 10 different areas where
I know walleyes are gonna be
spawning.
If we went out there at night and
electrofished it, or probably even
more, in here,
we've been out here electrofishing
and what we think is peak spawn,
and you get a couple here, you get
a couple there.
But you don't see the concentrations
of fish like we do in other lakes.
So what are the types of habitat
that are ideal for Wallace
Water?
So for walleye spawning, I mean,
their ideal habitat is to have
gravel and cobble.
And so, oftentimes they can
wind-swept shoreline so that it's
constantly cleaning that silt
and it's nice and oxygenated.
So when walleyes spawn, they're
broadcast spawners which means that
they spawn and then there's no
parental guarding or anything, they
just leave those eggs to the mercy
of environmental conditions.
But with that spawning habitat,
those eggs are sticky,
they fall down into the interstices
of that gravel and cobble.
Where they're kind of protected,
they've got enough oxygen, they're
not getting suffocated
by silt, so that's what walleyes
are really looking for.
So then why do they use the
marshes on the wolf?
So there's unique circumstances
where walleye can do some different
things. There's, I think, Lake Pepin
in the Mississippi River is a
similar situation.
And so somehow they're
making it work and found a way
to adapt to those marsh conditions
and spawning in them.
But in general, with walleye
as a river fish, that's what they're
seeking is gravel and cobble.
There's gravel and cobble in here,
but it's a smaller lake.
It doesn't get windswept just by the
general nature of it being small.
It's got the wind pushing us in a
little bit.
You want to put the GoPro in the
water, especially under some
of these green ones.
And if you need it, we've got a lot
of B-roll of that stuff,
of GoPro, of underwater photography
from our comms
gals.
They came out here and got in the
water for a couple days and did a
bunch of it.
Yeah, let's get that.
And if you need anything
specifically from me, Ethan, just
let me know.
Yeah, sure.
Evaluating those regulations.
So it feels like another one that's
gonna have science
and then the politics or
the implications for,
you know, the people that fish those
the most heavily, not
wanting to have to change what
they've always done.
Yeah, I think it's a little bit half
and half.
I understand why we're doing
it, and I'm glad we've done a very
nice experiment testing it at over
100 waters for a
period of time that will let us know
how panfish are going to respond.
I do worry a little because of
some panfish and negative
interactions with walleyes and other
species, because that should serve
to increase abundances, too, if you
lower exploitation.
But I guess that becomes part of the
next experiment to see what happens.
Well, that's crappie, right?
Yeah, crappi.
His perch abundance is good for
walleye. Right. Crappie.
Do they predate on walleyes more
exclusively?
The crappie? Yeah.
We think, and it's really difficult
with diet studies like that because
it can happen really, really
quickly.
You know, you've got a whole bunch of
crappies and then the walleyes are
all this big and they're interacting
in the same habitat.
They can disappear almost before you
can even track it.
But my inclination is that
when walleye are,
you know, being born,
they're interacting with adult
crappi that are feeding heavily at
that time. And crappies are...
They're piscivores.
They will eat plankton and things
like that.
But if they can get minnows, that's
going to be a main forage for them.
And I think it's just one of those
things where they could
probably wipe out a year class when
they're at higher abundance is
pretty quick.
Am I doing OK for you, Ethan?
It's great. OK.
So there really aren't going to be
any good wall-like cropping
lakes.
In general, what we
see is that they cycle.
There's rehabilitation.
So Kentucky Lake is a great example
up here in Vilas County, where
Kentucky Lake's walleye population
has collapsed a number of times.
Whenever it collapses, it usually
turns into a world-class crappie
fishery for a while.
I don't think it mentioned it in
Paul Romsky's Walleye Beautiful
Creature of the Nightbook, but he's
talking about the Upper Red Lakes.
When that population collapsed in
Upper Red, the walleye population,
that was a world-class destination
for crappies.
And so they seem to go that way
where if crappie get the upper edge,
walleye go down, or if walleye get
down for some reason it releases the
crappys.
I remember fishing Kentucky when I
was a kid and that was just
a crazy panfish lake and then all of
a sudden it shifted again.
So we have several examples of that
where a walleye population collapses
or declines and the crappie fishery
just takes off.
So why are large mouth bass
different than small mouth bass
then, when it comes to interacting?
With walleye.
Smallmouth habitat preferences are
much more specialized than
largemouth bass and largemouth
bass tend to be a bit more of a
generalist feeder.
So smallmouth bass, you know they're
spawning habitat they're going to
need to exclusively find some
gravel and cobble.
There might be sand over those areas
but they'll fan out a nest
to get to that habitat where
some of the largemouth Bass work
I've done.
They can spawn on just about
anything. You'll see them spawn on a
muck. You'll them spawning on top of
that log right there.
You'll seen them spawing on top of a
rock, especially when they're at
higher densities.
So they kind of make it work.
And I think what,
the largemouth and crappie, they're
very similar species, as
far as a bit more generalist in
their spawning habitats,
how much fish they eat.
Like smallmouth, they eat a lot of
crayfish if it's available.
They'll also eat fish too, but
they're typically associated with
rocks and crayfish.
Macro invertebrates where
bass are just much more generalist
predators probably much like
a crappie is
Should I just keep buttoning around
or do you need something specific?
I think we're probably good on this
end, we'll probably, if we head
back.
Get to him, Madison.
Alright.
If it was 82 here,
I don't know if you'd be pushing 90,
but I bet you it was pretty darn
warm.
Now this feels like what I expected,
like a nice day in spring to be.
This will be a nice bike day outside
of the, it's a little windy.
I don't know, yesterday was a
nice day, but when it gets windy
like this, depending on the net
location,
sometimes it causes the net to roll
and that can be
a little bit of a pain sometimes.
Is everything waterproof there for
you, Ethan?
This isn't, but a
little splash is fine.
All right, I mean there's not really
anything I can do.
It's fine.
Now that's a little bit more than a
little.
And that wind's picking up
now.
It'll just, once we go a little
more, I mean, I wonder if I could
go a bit faster maybe, and maybe
that'll help.
Just to get us away from this.
So there's some things spawning
wise, like there's a rock bar right
here you can see that big rock
on it. We're going to another
complex in the mid-lake as we go
across but there's rock bars
that are spread out over there too.
It's possible that there could be
some spawning on those, they're
just, we can't really at those
areas.
Yeah, so they're tougher to see, but
there's at least a couple of rock
bars that are out in this area
here and
through our radio telemetry, most
of the walleyes live right in this
bay.
There's a weed bed in about nine
feet of water where oftentimes when
we're out here doing our telemetery,
that's where they'll be.
That's during the day too, I'm sure
they distribute themselves around,
but like we're on a rock, there's a
rock bar right here.
Yeah, we're ontop of one.
So I think some of the better trees
that we'll get are up here
around the
corner.
I think what's interesting too is if
you look from a distance here, does
it look like there's anything
different about the forest after
240 trees?
No.
It really was surprising to me when
we did this one too, it's like, it
doesn't look different at all.
Questions about it or I want
all the length, weight, and age data
from bass ever collected in
Wisconsin and we're doing analysis
with.
So I kind of call
you know the summer is our
construction or field season and
our winter is kind of our analysis,
report writing, paper writing,
scientific article writing,
working on independent research
particularly for like
our younger technicians that are
just getting a start in the field
and want to embrace that experience.
So there's not a lot of ice fishing.
No, we've dabbled
in a little bit like we've got radio
transmitters like you saw go into a
tiger musky yesterday.
So we're tracking those fish
year-round on Escanaba so we
want to understand their winter
behavior as well.
So that's a little winter work.
We have done some of the fish sticks
work in the winter time on
some lakes as part of projects.
We were going to get into some
winter fisheries work by actually
setting gill nets underneath the ice
but that project kind of fizzled
out.
The collaboration with Minnesota
Duluth, it wasn't their fault or our
fault. It just, there were some
challenges with it and we never
really got it off the ground.
How do you collect a bike net
and what do you do with it?
You basically drill a hole and
you send out this kind of runner
that goes along the ice and you've
got to intersect another hole to get
the other end of it and then that
gill net hangs and you basically
pull it out the hole.
So you can pop in
minnow traps and things like that
too.
So Ethan, you wanted to get maybe
some GoPro or kind of stiller
footage closer to the older stuff?
Yeah. Are we going okay?
Perfect. All right.
The winter is kind of present.
I call general fisheries ecology and
management scientists that could
handle just about any species but
we do have some specialization with
Matt Mitro with his focus on
like statewide trout resources and
then E. L. Bsi is a
kind of a quantitative stock
assessment scientist so he's more
trained like almost like a marine
fisheries person would be
and he handles a lot of our Great
Lakes questions where these are
big models, big powerful models,
complex models.
And he's got a very special skill.