Like a Sturgeon

A mysterious gathering of large white sturgeon within a small area inside San Francisco Bay has baffled scientists but pleased sport anglers who like to fish for the prehistoric-looking behemoths.

LINK (Via: Outdoors, action and adventure)

Florida Keys permit get greater protection

A new Florida Keys fishing zone to protect permit becomes reality Aug. 31.

Despite the good news the zone is smaller than originally proposed.

The Special Permit Zone is smaller than approved in draft form in April. The Bonefish and Tarpon Trust, a Key Largo-based organization, unsuccessfully urged the FWC to move the northern boundary in the Gulf of Mexico about 50 miles north, to the originally proposed line off Cape Romano.

"Shrinking the size of the [special permit zone] will expose the spawning aggregations in Florida Bay to harvest," said Aaron Adams, the trust's operations director.

LINK (Via: Keys Net)

Permit art by Mike Savlen

First salmon released in the Upper Deschutes tributaries returns home

A 12-pound male salmon, one of thousands of Chinook that biologists and volunteers released into the Upper Deschutes tributaries above the Pelton-Round Butte Hydro Project in 2008, has made history. It’s the first fish to return.

LINK (Via: Deschutes Passage)

Carpocalypse

                                 Coming soon to a bayou near you

If the current flooding along the Mississippi River were not bad enough, a U.S. Geological Survey biologist and Asian carp expert says the fish are likely to show up in places where Mississippi flood waters intruded.

“We may now be finding them in lakes, ponds, bayous, anywhere the river water went. Those things will be full of carp now.”

LINK (Via:The Duluth News Tribune)

Dam!

The operators of Pacific Aquaculture on the Columbia attempted to use the protection of endangered fish as an argument to cut the flows on the Grand Coulee dam that is killing their net penned fish.

Judge James Redden in Portland rejected the bid of a major regional seafood company to link the protection of the farmed fish to that of wild fish considered in jeopardy under the Endangered Species Act.

He said the company hadn't shown that the management of the dam in Washington state to prevent flooding in cities downstream had put any wild fish at risk. 

LINK (Via: ABC News)

Alaska's largest lake trout and steelhead

A story about Alaskas's largest lake trout and steelhead landed by a couple of young anglers.

The memory of the monster of Clarence Lake remains as vivid for Daniel Thorsness today as the stillness of the clear, foggy morning 32 years ago when he hauled ashore a lake trout as big as a king salmon.

Biologists who study lake trout in the state say they've never even encountered a fish close to the size of the 47-pound monster that Thorsness pulled out of a relatively small, wilderness lake nearly 3,000-feet high in the Talkeetna Mountains.

LINK (Via: The Anchorage Daily News)