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General movements for some Walleye tagged in 2018. Note that these interpreted movements are predicted from receiver detections and do not provide exact locations or represent all Walleye in the waterbody. Still, we find them pretty interesting and hope you agree.
This is primarily directed at tournament anglers who will be keeping fish in a livewell for a few hours. If fish are to be released immediately, they would not normally require fizzing.
Videos
The Lab crew conducted some interesting experiments on Lake Ontario to determine whether gobies will consume any of the “bottom fry” stage of Smallmouth Bass if the male is angled off the nest and quickly returned. They were able to get some amazing footage that provides the answer.
This is some great footage of spawning Smallmouth Bass collected by our field crew.
In an earlier video, we showed that Round Gobies will consume the bottom-fry stage of Smallmouth Bass if the male is angled off the nest. Another interesting question is whether swim-up fry are safe from predation by gobies since they are now off the bottom and more mobile. The lab crew was recently able to get some amazing video footage that also provides the answer to this question.
Every now and then, our Lab crew comes across some fascinating things in the water. This video from a few days ago, shows an ambitious (or very attractive!) male Smallmouth spawning with three females!
This post provides a look at our aquaponics systems at Queen’s University. For many reasons, we think this approach might be the best way to feed the growing human population on this planet in the years to come. If you’d like to learn more about this, we’ve provided this video.
For obvious reasons, it’s difficult for most people to observe the behaviours of wild fish. With this in mind, we think some people may find it interesting to see some bass behaviours that our field crews have been able to capture on film while working on Lake Ontario. In this post, we show footage of a male bass clearing the area for a nest. After watching this footage, it’s easy to understand why some fish may still be showing signs of damage on their tail and underside for a period of time after the spawning season. This Smallmouth Bass engaged in 12 nest clearing bouts during an hour of video footage and clearly wasn’t finished when the camera stopped rolling.
While snorkelling to monitor the ecology of bass spawning, our crew often come across many other interesting things. One of the highlights from this season was a bay on the St Lawrence River where several large channel cats were nesting in abandoned tires. Similar to bass, male channel cats make nests in late spring and early summer (usually around rocks or woody structure) and then guard the eggs deposited by a female. In this case, it was interesting that the bay was full of round gobies (known egg predators), but the tires seemed to create the perfect defence strategy to keep gobies away from the eggs…no gobies were observed inside the tires. One can’t help but wonder whether this was intentional or simply coincidence.
The images associated with this post show an interesting aspect of the biology of Smallmouth Bass…the ability to rapidly change their colour as a “signal” to indicate their mood, or current behavioural state.