This year the Interjurisdictional Fishes Subgroup of the Ohio River Valley Ecosystem Team (ORVET) was awarded $20,000 from Region-3 challenge cost-share with a match of $220,000 from partners to process data for an assessment of Mississippi River Basin paddlefish. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service operates and manages a coded-wire tag/data processing center in support of a basin-wide paddlefish stock assessment project being conducted by the Mississippi Interstate Cooperative Resource Association (MICRA), an organization of 22 state natural resource agencies. The ORVET ranked this project second of the twenty projects submitted to the team. This project is co-managed by Chuck Surprenant and Greg Conover at the Carterville Fishery Resources Office and Jim Milligan and JoAnne Grady at the Columbia Fishery Resources Office.

The paddlefish is an important interjurisdictional fish, yet management strategies for this species are highly variable across the basin. Paddlefish are listed as a species of special concern by ten basin states, are sport and/or commercially exploited in 12 other basin states, and have been stocked in at least 12 states over the last five years. Because of the decline of European sturgeon stocks, North American paddlefish and sturgeon have been subject to increasing harvest to supply eggs to meet the worldwide demand for caviar.

Thus far, staff at the Carterville and Columbia Fishery Resources Offices have inputted field data for 91 sampling trips and 20 hatchery releases from calendar-year 2000. A total of 1,797 wild-ranging paddlefish were captured in 2000. Of these fish, 1,763 were tagged and released, and 172 were recaptures. All reference tags (>3,500) from wild and hatchery tagged paddlefish have been read and entered into the database. All recapture tags (~200) have been extracted, and approximately half have been read.

Future data analysis will include identifying crucial data gaps, evaluating contribution of hatchery paddlefish, and quantifying movements and harvest. Results from this project will directly benefit Service offices in several regions including refuges and hatcheries.

This project is part of a larger basin-wide paddlefish assessment project on the Mississippi River managed by MICRA. Biologists in the 22 MICRA states have collected six years of tag and recapture data from paddlefish throughout the basin. More than 1.2 million hatchery-reared paddlefish and an additional 10,000 wild-ranging paddlefish have been coded-wire tagged and released. Recapture data are available from more than 1,000 recaptured paddlefish. This stock assessment is expected to continue for at least another 5 years.

Partners in the project include 22 state natural resource agencies within the Mississippi River Basin and The Nature Conservancy.