Welcome to the Arkansas Wildlife Podcast, the official podcast of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

We are talking hunting, fishing and conservation with engaging guests and in-depth discussions with game and fish staff.

It's Arkansas Wildlife, the podcast for all things outdoors in the natural state.

Welcome to the Arkansas Wildlife Podcast.

I'm Trey Reed, happy to be your host here for another episode of Arkansas Wildlife.

And we've got a good one for you today, especially if you're and angler and particularly if you're a bass angler.

We're joined by Katie Thompson, who is a fisheries biologist with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

Katie, welcome to the Arkansas Wildlife Podcast.

Hey, Trey.

Thanks for having me.

I'm honored to be here.

Well, thank thanks for thanks for driving up from Southwest Arkansas to record here at our podcast studio in little Rock.

You are in in southwest Arkansas.

That's kind of your your territory will get into a little bit more about what you do, but like how tell us a little bit about yourself, how long you've been with Arkansas game and fish.

I will be with Arkansas game and fish.

It'll be three years end of June.

Okay.

All right.

So still getting my feet wet, so to speak.

All right.

Where are you?

Where were you before?

Before here.

I originally came here from south central Kansas.

Worked a lot over in Kansas.

Went to school in Kansas, and then took my first big girl job in Oklahoma, for about a year, and then wanted to come a little further south and loved Arkansas, and here I am.

All right.

Well, I'll give us so southwest Arkansas, where where's home office for you.

Like, which which office do you work out of?

So I work out of the home office.

It's also like an a small offshoot of Hope called Prairie Town.

But for most people at home.

Yes.

What I hope will put more people like in in proximity to work where the office actually is.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to be talking a lot today about a particular project that Katie's leading up.

A a telemetry project.

Basically research on largemouth bass on Millwood Lake, which is a big impoundment of the little River and some other rivers and streams kind of come together all right there to form Millwood.

It's a corps of engineer impoundment known for producing some nice large mouths.

And Katie is going to tell us all about that.

But before we jump into that, what are what you tell us?

Like what?

What is your job entail?

What are you what do you do?

I mean, obviously you're you're studying bass on Millwood, but got a lot of other water bodies.

What are some other water bodies, kind of stuff that you're doing on a day to day basis.

So in the southwest region, we actually have the tri lakes skilling, Dirks and the Queen and Lake Greeson all the way down to the Louisiana border with Mercer Bayou.

We do a lot with the Red River.

So we like to say like trout to alligators to alligator gar, and sturgeon.

And between shovelnose sturgeon.

Yep.

And so, you know, you can always have plans made, but they always seem to find a way to change sometimes.

But we'll do like the general fish, Saint plate.

Excuse me?

Fish.

Population sampling.

Gotcha.

Lots of habitat work.

We do a lot of aquatic aquatic vegetation management with our long growing season and warm water.

Yeah.

You're in a part of the state where we have to worry about some aquatic nuisance vegetation, like giant salvinia has been found in that part of the state.

Yeah.

What else do we do?

Of course, research projects like what we're going to talk about today with different species and the statewide species management teams.

We do creel surveys where we interact a lot more with anglers.

And this is a busy time of year for you.

It's May as we're recording this, I mean, thanks for for taking some time away from that awesome field work to come up here and talk to us in the office today.

Well, Millwood is I mean, it's got a pretty good reputation for for producing big bass.

And I'm guessing that's kind of how we ended up wanting to know more about.

But it is popular among bass anglers.

Yes, definitely.

So tell us do a tell us a little bit about this project.

How how how did it get started.

Where where where did we where did we where do we where do we begin?

Here, I guess.

Yeah.

Where do you begin?

It's it's such a large, complex water body.

So, you know, if you look at Millwood on a map, you kind of have a whole chain of backwaters and the little river kind of on the west side of the lake, and that's still considered part of the lake up to that highway.

I think it's 71, bridge at Wilton Landing.

And then you look over towards the east and it's like the big bowl is what we call it.

And it's a huge water body.

It's so complex.

And in the past, when we're sampling, you know, we're limited to shoreline.

Electric fishing segments is typically how you sample, our water bodies for bass.

And it just seemed like we weren't getting the fish that we knew would be there.

And, of course, there's some gear bias associated with electric fishing.

And so we then we'd go home on the weekends and we get all these pictures of all these big bass and weighed in at tournaments.

And it's like, man, we're not we're not seeing all those fish.

And we're not getting near the number of fish that we think we should be for a water body that size.

And so as managers, when you have all these, all of our constituents that are really relying on us to make good management decisions, we really want some solid data.

And we just felt like we were lacking in that capacity.

And I had some missing pieces there.

So you're getting back to Millwood.

I mean, folks, a lot of bass anglers I know are going to be familiar with Millwood, but it it's a big core of engineer empowerment.

But it is not really like a lot of the other big corps of engineer impoundments when you think of Washita, Beaver, Bull Shoals, nor for Greers Ferry, these are these big upland reservoirs, deep clear Water and Mill Big bear with 30,000.

Yeah, roughly like at least 26,000 for sure at full conservation.

Gotcha.

So it's big but not real deep, especially relative to those other ones.

Correct?

Correct.

Yeah.

When you if you you can easily see it if you look at any sort of, bathymetry map at Millwood, you've got the main river channel that gets up to like 30ft deep.

But if you look at a lot of those huge flats, especially out in the bowl, the average depth is only in 2013.

The USGS has five feet.

I bet it's more like four feet now.

Okay, just with the amount of sedimentation that's coming in downstream, will and and we think of largemouth bass and in other, you know, sport fish species, bream, crappie that we really associate them more with shallow water and that, that, shoreline habitat and that, that parts of the lake.

But there's so I guess getting to your point, like, they could really be just about anywhere in Millwood, right?

Yes.

And, and and it's interesting, you know, we'll talk about the results here later on.

And what we saw, we were we were kind of surprised but also not as surprised.

But yeah, those giant flats where there's just stump fields out there, especially in the bowl, our fish really hanging out there.

And of course, Millwood has a good reputation for crappie and catfish as well.

So it's a very good, productive lowland system.

And we really wanted to get a good grasp on, on especially bass, but fish movement and that habitat that's out there and getting, getting out on the water a lot more, has helped us build some reputation with our anglers and really talk with our anglers a lot more.

I think they really love seeing us out on the water.

The tough part for us as management biologists is there's two of us for that huge area.

And as much as we love our jobs and we love to do what we do, there's only so much limited time.

And yeah, I mean, there's only so many hours in a day and so many days in a month and months in a year.

And, well, obviously I know a lot of folks, especially bass anglers, will be excited to hear about the focus on on Millwood because it is the big the big fishery down there.

We talked about the size of it and and very popular among bass anglers.

So okay, we've got a situation here.

We got a lake.

We we as a management agency don't feel like we're getting the complete picture of, of you know, all the data points we need.

So, enter, largemouth bass telemetry research on Millwood.

What does that mean, Katie?

Yeah.

So telemetry, radio telemetry is what we chose to pursue that with this project.

We had, Jeff Quinn on talking about acoustic.

He was using a Nova C, which is another form of telemetry that you can do.

But after talking, we actually met, thanks to Jeremy Risley and Eric Nass, our black black bass program, biologists.

We actually met with Texas.

They did a study recently, kind of doing something very similar to what we plan to do.

And then we also met with Gene Gilliland, who is just known in the bass fishing community, and we got to meet with those individuals before we even started, when we were writing the proposal for this project and talk about, hey, what did you want to do better?

What what did you like that you did and really bounce a lot of our ideas off of them?

We got together, and so we said, okay, cool.

And radio telemetry studies, they normally don't do, they do small, they tag a small number of fish like maybe 20 maximum.

And they usually do a lot of radio telemetry on like smaller lakes.

Okay.

And so this was a big bite that we bit off out of the pie, so to speak.

Well, so what what kind of information are you looking for?

What are you going to get from from a telemetry study like this, as opposed to, like, your, you know, routine annual or biannual, like fishing surveys and that sort of stuff.

So mainly we're looking at fish movement and habitat use and of course, habitat uses associated with those movements.

So some things that will be able to look at once we dive into the data are like home range and maximum distance moved.

And to see if these fish are hanging out in one sort of habitat over time or are they moving as the conditions are changing through the year?

Yeah.

Like with water levels come up or fall down depending on rainfall and things like that, or they hanging out there or are they finding something else.

Are they just.

Yeah, completely leaving.

So that was well, I guess this would be a good place to note that this is ongoing.

We we in the study, there are still fish with these, devices, implanted in them, that you're monitoring and will continue to monitor for some time.

So let's talk about before we get much deeper.

What what is this?

How do you embark on a project like this?

What's got to be done to set it up where we can actually go look for these fish?

Yeah.

So initially we we talked with advanced telemetry systems.

They're usually kind of the main company and radio telemetry tags.

So we talked with them talked about Millwood and the system that it is.

And in Texas a study when they initially tagged fish, they tagged them in September, which was a little different.

When you're tagging fish and doing those surgeries, you mainly operate around water temperatures.

And so they tried tagging at like 70 degrees, but in September and they had 100% fish mortality event with their tagged fish.

Every fish they tag, every fish they tagged died.

So that was a big no.

That's no good.

Oh this is like oh, no.

So we we planned it out to where we got the tags ordered in time, well ahead of time.

And then we have to get staff on board because we had Kelly Winningham, our fisheries pathologist, come down and do the surgeries.

We wanted to coordinate with some of our other staff and management, and we had some help from Doctor Lockman over at UPB.

And he really wanted to come down.

He's done a lot of work with trout, with radio telemetry.

So we really valued his input as well.

And so a lot of the coordination, getting people together, figuring out, what time of year we wanted to do the tagging and, and of course, weather plays a big factor and whether or not we could actually tag those fish, making sure we had the equipment.

And so we, we aimed for March 2nd, third week of March because that's when we normally electro fish, and that's what we plan to use to collect this first batch of fish that we're getting ready to really dive into is pretty, pretty interesting too.

We were able to join in and shoot some, some video and some and still photos of one of the, one of the days when you were out there.

Tell us, like, kind of how that part of work.

So you got to catch the fish, right?

Correct.

Yeah.

So it was quite the, quite the system as, as you saw when we were out there, we had our electro fishing boat, because that's how we were capturing our fish.

And we also, I guess before we get into that, we divided the lake up into five different study areas.

We, we purchased 50 tags and so we wanted five different study areas.

Of course, we wanted two out in the bowl that we talk about of Millwood, which was Oak Landing.

And then we wanted State Park because historically we had got some good fish from there.

And then of course, Yarborough is kind of this middle pivot point to us where the river comes in, but you've got the bowl.

So our fish moving back up the river, are they moving out to the bowl?

Is this really, you know, big questions that we wanted to answer or be able to get some insight on.

And then of course we wanted to up Riverside.

So we did McGuire and White Cliffs, and then we did Horseshoe Lake, some of these backwater oxbow lakes up in the river.

Okay.

So you got multiple study sites.

You go out there, you've got, an electric fishing boat.

And for those who don't know what electric fishing is, basically we send a an electrical pulse into the water.

It temporarily stuns the fish, somewhat immobilizes them and them enough to where we can catch them with long handled nets and then put them in a holding tank.

And, that's what we do every spring to, like, do population surveys and we, you know, do do it for a certain amount of time.

And we, we determine catch rates and population models based on that.

Very I know, Katie, that's super oversimplified.

No, that's not bad for 100%.

Correct.

Yeah.

So the next step though, instead of like just measuring these fish, weighing them.

What?

Whatever.

Taken a fin clip for genetics.

The big step is we're performing a surgery on a live fish, out in the, on a barge, essentially out in the lake.

Tell us about how that part of the process goes down.

Yeah.

So we we brought out our, our 20ft barge and that was our mobile operating station, as we said, so we like for okay, when you came out with us, for example, we brought the barge out and we kind of anchored it in an area where it wasn't going to rock around a whole lot with the wind and everything, and meanwhile they were out.

Shocking.

We had a couple of tanks set up to where we had to recover a holding tank, and that was used to hold the fish, make sure they were doing okay.

We weren't going to operate on any fish that didn't look like they were going to be able to survive surgery.

We don't want it.

We don't want 100% mortality like that, so.

Absolutely not.

And so Kelly had her we have a she has like, a mobile fish operating station that's got its specialized equipment for our fish.

Sit in like a foam cut out, and we've got water pulsing over the gills while they're sedated.

But for sedation and said most fish surgeries, they'll use a combination of clove oil and Ms.

222.

And so you not have to knock fish out with those methods before you can even operate on them.

It takes like five minutes or so.

We really wanted to capture the fish, make sure they were good, do surgeries on them and get them right back in the water, and so reduce that amount of time that they're being handled.

They're being held in a holding tank, all that stuff.

Because with those other methods, when they come out of surgery, you kind of have to nurse them for about 30 minutes to make sure they're out of it.

And then there's also some human consumption advisories when, you know, they've had these anesthetics in their system.

Sure.

We don't want that to negatively impact our constituents.

So we went with the Smith route electric fish handling gloves.

Doctor Lockman had been doing that with these.

And these are really cool.

They are they're almost like little tens units.

But essentially kind of like how you have an open circuit.

One hand is like our anode and one hand is our cathode.

And so the circuit closes through the fish.

So as long as I have both hands on the fish, it will stay still with just a little bit of electricity.

Yeah, this is pretty cool because I saw Katie wearing these gloves, and they they look they look a lot like the, fish cleaning gloves that came with your fillet knife.

They that mesh almost.

Yeah.

Except you've got, like, I guess little electrodes, like you said, in the fingers and palms of these things.

And so you grab hold that fish and it's like it just stay still and stay still.

Yeah.

And so then, of course, we, we would take each fish, one fish at a time.

Kelly would insert the tags and we'd suture them up and, like, three sutures.

And then we had a tank on the barge where we did a salt dip to help get their slime coat back on them.

And then we held them in a recovery tank for about five minutes.

And by that time, if we needed more fish, all of our fish were on the barge, ready to be operated on so we would have our electrician boat take those fish, go put them back out where he had captured them.

Okay.

And that was essentially the cycle.

If you're if you're watching on on the YouTube version of this, I'm going to hold up.

This is basically what is implanted in the fish.

Now if you're just listening, I'm sorry you can't see it, but you can go check out the YouTube version, the Arkansas Gaming Fish Commission YouTube channel here.

But like I said, 2 or 3 stitches.

Little small, small, small incision.

Place that in there.

It's just a little tag with the watch battery in it.

Yeah.

Yeah, it.

Yeah, I think that looks like a exactly like a watch battery.

But anyway, pretty pretty fascinating.

Okay, so, we've got another version here, actually, that has an antenna.

And you say these are a little bit easier to detect because of that antenna.

And some of it, some fish.

A second phase of the study of some of kind of a second group of fish that we marked got got this tag here.

Anyway, I apologies to those of you who are listening on Spotify or, or Apple Podcast.

If you really want to see what those devices look like, you can go to the Arkansas Game Fish Commission YouTube channel and check it out.

Okay, so fisher surgeries are complete.

The fish are out there in the water.

Returned to the water where they were caught.

What happens next?

So we waited.

I think initially we were hoping for two weeks, but ended up being a month because guess what?

We're biologists of the state and other things seem to pop up.

I mean, you can't just devote all your time to this project.

I man.

Yeah, if I could, if I could, it would be challenging.

But, I'm really appreciative that we did get the permission and the we have the ability to be able to do this on top of everything else we do.

Yeah.

But essentially, yeah.

So we dedicated about one day per study site and wind really dictated which side I did per day.

But we'd go out with this box.

This is our receiver, and it's essentially hooked up to, a five element Yagi antenna, which means it just has five fingers.

We mounted it actually, to our boat with a attached an antenna to a metal conduit pipe that's attached to our boat.

So we use our boat to kind of swing around and.

Okay, looking for fish.

And I like to think of this as, like, your radio in your car.

So you've got all your preprogramed, your favorite stations on there.

And that's what each of the tags, we can program this receiver with all of the tag numbers that we know are out there swimming.

And we can cycle it through and scan for specific, like a slightly different frequency for each one of the tags.

Is that what's going on there?

Okay.

Each track is different.

And so we can go out and start scanning for these tags that we know are out there with this receiver.

And when we pick up a fish it'll be.

So we're listening for beeps.

And you tell me that this, aspect of the research can be quite tedious and monotonous, how it is you want to play a selection of what you get to listen through your through your headphones out there with the boat.

Stuff.

So this, this white noise, I'm guessing that because they're, we're talking about a 25 to 30,000 acre lake with 50 fish.

There's probably a whole lot more of that than any kind of ding or ping or you're a lot of static and not much, radio station getting two.

Dan.

Is that right?

Yeah.

This this may or may not have put a technician to sleep on the boat a couple of times.

But.

And you and you hear it in your sleep.

But.

Yeah, it'll beep when we do detect a fish.

So then, like, you mark that location and how how does that, like, you know, is that is that all built into the the receiver here?

How how does that work?

You got to get a GPS or what what what what's going on there.

Simply put there's another.

So we've got a volume and what we call a gain switch on this receiver.

And think of the gain switch like when you're looking through binoculars and you see something and it's kind of blurry, but you can tell there's something there.

And then you use your focus to kind of turn in and narrow down on and provide some clarity.

That's what this gain knob does, is that helps us really focus on that tag noise.

And so as you turn that gain down, you can get closer to where that fish is.

And then once I get that gain down to almost 0 or 10%, that's where I'm pretty confident that that's where that fish is.

Right.

And so that's when we mark the location.

We're taking different measurables.

We're taking of course, a GPS point.

We're looking at dissolved oxygen in the water that it's at the water temperature, water clarity.

We're making notes, specific species specific notes of what different types of vegetation or habitat are there.

Okay.

And, and then we have live scope that we've been using to drop underneath the water and actually try and see the fish under the water like another component to.

It's like almost like a ground truth thing, like oh that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There there's, there's the fish that I think I'm listening to right here.

Of course, you know, you can't tell with 100% confidence, but okay, there's a fish suspended on this tree right where I'm marking this location.

And there's usually more than one fish there too, which is really cool to see.

And they look like bats.

You know, you can tell different species on life scope from one another.

Crappie look way bigger than than what they usually are.

And bass look a little more bullet shaped, obviously, like your gar and paddlefish are super easy to pick out, but we did get some training on the live scope ahead of time.

So, of course we're still learning the live scope too, as we're using like a lot.

But a lot of anglers out there still are still learning how to use the forward facing sonar.

It takes a year plus to really get that dialed in.

Good, but we are lucky enough to get some training ahead of time.

It's pretty awesome.

Just the, you know, the technology of, of this of this, you know, telemetry tags, I mean, being small enough to, to fit into a fish and not, you know, adversely affect their movements or their behavior or their health, and then being able to pick it up, and then you add the, the forward facing sonar did a lot, a lot of component to this.

So how long does that aspect of the project?

I mean, how many days are y'all out there, like trying to find fish and how hard is it?

It's at first it took a long time to get it figured out.

It would take a couple of days per study site.

And so if we have five study sites and that's a full workweek at least.

But on top of that, you also know that there's some fish that you aren't picking up.

And so with Millwood being so huge, you just want to kind of Rome and try and find these other fish, because you want to be able to try and find all 50 fish that we're tracking, to be able to tell where they are moving.

And so it normally took about a work week and then any additional time, like making full lake runs.

Towards December of this past year, we started getting in an airplane and flying and trying to pick up these fish where we couldn't get a boat.

So there was definitely some challenges in trying to find fish with it being so shallow.

There were a lot of areas where I couldn't even get a boat to shore.

And they drew it down over the summer months.

Wildlife did some, some duck habitat.

Planning for that requires stuff like that.

That requires like a 2 to 3ft drawdown.

And when your average depth is 4 to 5ft out on those flats, there's there's no way you can get a boat across that unless you're in a mud boat or something, but not an airboat or something like that.

Yeah.

But even with as many stumps, it was still very challenging.

But I'm still happy with the results.

I mean, were you able to find, like, a good number of them or.

We, we really did.

So we detected 44 out of the 50 fish.

Oh, wow.

This one that's got a I got a I mean, I don't know anything about, like, what's typical or average, but that seemed like that's a pretty good return right there.

We think so.

We definitely think so.

And and I picked up an additional one when we were in the plane.

But weather delayed me going out and actually ground, treating it in the boat.

And I couldn't find it where I thought it was.

And we when we picked it up in the plane.

So that was another, 44 out of 50 is pretty dang good.

Yeah, I was pretty happy with that.

All right, so you've got these fish swimming around, pinging, sending off this, radio frequency signal.

You've got your receiver here and receivers and planes, you got your forward facing sonar to sort of water truth.

Some of that, like, I'm actually looking at this bass that I think I'm listening to.

Which.