An Outdoorsman's Journal: The young biologists

Hello friends,

One of the bonuses about my daughter Selina going to the UW Stevens Point is that she introduced me to several future biologists. This week I will have the pleasure of introducing you to one who is seeking his Master’s degree on a project that is both very interesting and important.

Dylan Undlin, with the help of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and UWSP, is working on a project to determine native and non-native trout movement in Lake Superior tributaries, specifically the Knife and Steward Rivers, which are both in the Two Harbors area. The base for Dylan’s work is the French River Fisheries office just south of Knife River.

This research is meant to determine the effects of warm water on trout, which is a known stressor to these fish. Due to space concerns, I can only go into detail of how they are doing this work.

Monday, July 21, 2024

High 74, low 63

Dylan Undlin is probably the perfect description of a future fisheries and aquatic sciences biologist. Since graduating from UWSP he has worked in remote areas of Alaska, such as the Yukon River, and as a fish technician for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Dylan is an avid outdoorsman who spent much of his younger life in Miles City, Montana and has more hunting and fishing stories than most 23-year-olds that I know.

Since March, Dylan has been living in a remote cabin with no TV or WiFi.

Levi Miller is also a very impressive young-man. Levi will be entering his senior year at UWSP and is pursuing the same degree as Dylan and Selina did previously. He is a fish technician on this project who is originally from Jordan, Montana, and is also into hunting and fishing and like Dylan, he is tough as nails.

Today would be spent in the bush, in the water on the Steward River and we would be steam electrofishing (shocking) for brook trout. To describe this job, I would have to say, physical, hot, humid, millions of mosquitoes that you simply cannot let bother you, precise and technological.

Dylan and Levi would be in front of me with backpack shockers that temporarily shock the trout, allowing them to net to catch them. I would be behind them and be the backup man with a net and a bucket to transport the fish.

During the next two days one of my personal thoughts was don’t trip and lose the fish before these guys could do their work. I did not fail. We would do 560 foot sections of stream at a time and then it was time to work up the fish.

Each trout is measured, weighed, fin clipped with a section of the fin saved, and scale samples are taken from each fish for aging as well genetic testing. Each fish receives a PIT “passive integrated transponder” tag, or in some cases, a small radio transmitter is surgically implanted into the trout’s abdomen for future work with telemetry and drones.

My friends, what I witnessed over the two days I spent on the Knife and Steward Rivers was a thing of beauty. The PIT tag is the size of a piece of rice and implanted with a syringe. The radio transmitter is literally implanted by surgery into the abdomen of the fish.

The process for implanting the radio transmitter goes like this. Water is slowly flushed into the mouth of the fish as transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) keeps the trout calm during surgery. Dylan uses a scalpel to make the incision, insert the transmitter and then sew the incision shut. You have to see this to believe it and in every case the surgery worked.

The reason for this study is because northeast Minnesota does not have enough cold water which is what trout need to survive. In many cases that is due to either logging, which reduces the forest canopy so streams receive a lot more sunlight. Another cause of warming trout streams is beaver dams. Probably the biggest reason is climate change which is creating irregular moisture (rain/snow) and warming temperatures.

So here is how this process works. Cables across both rivers are attached to solar panels that charge deep cycle batteries that power transponders. When a fish swims under the cable with a PIT tag in it, this movement is registered and recorded for the researchers. The trout with transmitters implanted in them are followed by telemetry that can be completed on foot or with drones.

The goal behind this research is to find cold water, which in almost all cases comes from underground springs. This will help researchers learn more about how the cold water sources attract trout and affect their life.

I was given the opportunity to bushwhack with an antenna and look for trout No. 615. The work is physical and you have to be careful or you could do damage to your antenna. The telemetry will pick up the fish within 800 feet and though this fish was found a few weeks ago, it was not today and it is amazing how far they can travel.

Later in the day we were on the Knife River and Dylan found brookie No. 555. Iit was in 36 inches of water on a sharp oxbow and hanging out under a deadfall.

Without present and future research biologists like Dylan Undlin and Levi Miller this world would be in tougher shape than it already is.

Sunset