April 24, 2014 — The project is a three-year, million-dollar partnership to install ultrasonic radio transmitters inside as many Atlantic sturgeon as possible during their spring and fall runs to track their movements over the next 10 years. Tagging began during spawning season last fall in the Pamunkey and Mattaponi rivers, both tributaries of the York River. It began again in mid-February in the James and York.
On a fishing boat in Burwell Bay on the James River, fisheries ecologist Pat McGrath prepped for surgery.
The patient was a freshly netted subadult sturgeon about 29 inches long and 4 years old — in sturgeon years, a mere teenager. And McGrath's mission, as part of a new interstate partnership to better understand the movements and behavior of endangered sturgeon, was to insert an ultrasonic tracker.
First, the sturgeon was measured in length and girth, and scanned to make sure it hadn't already been tagged elsewhere. Then it was fitted with two tags near the dorsal fin: an exterior tag with contact information should it ever be found, and a PIT tag, or passive integrated transponder, about the size of a grain of rice, implanted under the skin with a syringe. Finally, a tiny piece of fin was snipped off and bottled for genetic testing.
McGrath laid the sturgeon on netting suspended between PVC pipes in a cooler filled with fresh water, then fed a weak electrical current into the water to induce electronarcosis, a kind of anesthetic state. He amped it up until the sturgeon rolled on its back, gills buffeting, as if inviting a belly rub.
Rapidly, McGrath knelt by the cooler and picked up a scalpel. It was tough going cutting through the bony plates lurking just below the skin in the fish's midsection, but he finally managed a 2-inch incision. A small amount of blood washed into the water.
Read the full story at the Daily Press