To the Day I Never Thought Would Come

I made it- 168 days after I released the first tagged trout back to Loyalsock, I am hanging my waders up to dry.  Telemetry season 2016 is over. And, it a good one. 
Here are a few quick numbers to describe the last 6 months.

• 1,200- The estimated number of hours I spent tracking and tagging. A 12-hour tracking day was common, especially in the fall when I was driving four hours between State College and Loyalsock.  But, those were nothing in comparison to the 17+ hour days of tagging. I won’t miss those.
• 2,211- The total number of detections. Some fish we detected once, others nearly 50 times. There will be no shortage of data.
• 200- The approximate number of fish that were tagged. While we only had 165 unique tags, many dropped tags were reinserted into other fish. At one point I think we had tagged every adult brook trout in the study streams.
• 964- The number of blood and gill samples sitting in the freezer. Many of these have already been sent to our collaborators in West Virginia where they are analyzing for certain genes and molecular markers. The early results from this work are very promising, but I have to do a lot of background reading before I can do any of it justice. My brain shuts down when I hear the word “gene,” or really anything to do with molecules.  If I can’t see it, I don’t understand it. But, that’s about to change.  Hopefully.
• 28- A rough count of the number of people, mostly volunteers, that were needed to make this project happen. And that’s only those that got their feet wet. It doesn’t count everyone that helped rush permits, fixed telemetry equipment, or provided other forms of technical support. I thought for sure we would lose volunteers after they realized the job was mostly just carrying around buckets of water.  But, they returned every day, and always seemed even more excited to carry buckets of water. It takes a village. 
• A really high number- The amount of times I thought for sure this project was failing. It started well before May when I had no idea how to use the equipment, extended into the first few weeks when the tags started rapidly dropping, and by the end of the summer I thought I had nothing more than a really boring dataset of fish that don’t move. Perseverance paid off. 

Three members of the army, including two volunteers. I think volunteering to lift buckets in freezing temperatures is a sign of insanity, but I can't thank them enough.

The lack of adult trout may have made me a little desperate on which fish I was willing to collect tissue from. Thankfully by now I'm fairly good at drawing blood, so even the small fish survive the process unharmed.

What’s on the docket now?  First off, a lot of sleep. Then, a lot of unanswered emails. “I’m in the field” has been a great way of avoiding a lot of requests and obligations.  Thankfully most people emailing me understand the chaos of field season, but I can no longer play that card.

After that, it’s time to start thinking about how to analyze all the data.  In addition to the telemetry study I have about three other projects that are in need of attention. The data for all of them are collected, the results fairly clear and predictable, but it’s time to start making them more official and getting them ready to publish. For example, I can tell you a lot of great information from what I saw in the field.  But, rather than saying “the fish moved,” I need to relate movement patterns to things like stream flow, fish size, and hopefully genetics. To do that, I also first have to clean all the data- fix bad GPS points, download temperature data, make sure everything is recorded correctly, etc.  A lot of mind numbing days are ahead.  But, sneak peek- the fish moved. And the most surprising thing, at least to me, is how many fish moved to Loyalsock after spawning. We thought it might happen, but I was thinking it would be a smaller percentage than what we found. During November sampling we really struggled to find adult brook trout, while in September they were plentiful.

While I’m looking forward to spending more time at the office and having some resemblance of a normal schedule back, it won’t take long for me to miss Loyalsock. While the bulk of field work for my degree is now complete, we have discussed the possibility of sampling more in the spring and summer.  So, hopefully it won’t be too long before I’m back.
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For now, Happy Thanksgiving! And if you’re fishing Loyalsock, keep an eye out for my antennas.  My babies are on their own until spring. 

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