Mason Dado,WDNR Summer Intern
My summer’s internship has been a great experience for gaining knowledge and understanding of how fisheries work is done in the Department of Natural Resources. It has shown me different lanes and applications needed to succeed at the job.
Being well versed in different variations of net mending, motor expertise, data entry, all display well versed knowledge of the fisheries even though I have a long way to go in some of these tall tasks. As for the fish side of things, being able to catch and collect data on fish being as small as 2 inches and as big as 60 inches can be very useful as well as fascinating.
For the last couple of weeks we have been doing our trout surveys to better understand how the population is doing or how habitat has changed over time. We were using a barge shocker to collect most of the data. This gives my boss Kasey Yallaly an understanding on what could be done differently to improve or help make differences in a certain area.
We also did some sturgeon work when I first started out. We took measurements and tagged these fish to see if any recapture would occur to check growth rates along with movement patterns. Being able to handle some of these prehistoric beasts was pretty awesome and one of my favorite parts. Doing this studies also gives an estimate of population to see if anglers would even be able to target them. Overall, this has been a great experience for me to get a better understanding of how things work in a real time outdoor environment.
I want to thank everyone who contributed and made this opportunity a reality along with Kasey Yallaly and her two LTEs Dustin Schurrer and Sam Jacobson. All three of them work extremely hard and had the patience to help me understand how fisheries work and helped answer my questions. I feel some people in the fish community need more credit especially in themselves because without them improvement would not be made to help sustain some of these fisheries for more anglers of many generations!
Editors Note: Mason’s internship was sponsored by, Star Prairie Fish & Game,
and the Kiap-TU-Wish and Clearwater Chapters of Trout Unlimited.
