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Sturgeon

Lake Sturgeon

Capturing Lake Champlain lake sturgeon has been a challenge for Vermont Fish and Wildlife and our office. This field season was the third year we have attempted to sample the spawning runs in the Winooski and Lamoille Rivers. To date, we have not captured any spawning females. This is in spite of changing our methods to including twenty-four hour net sets.

We were successful at capturing adult males. Sometimes the same males over all three years of sampling and sometimes the same males several times during a single spawning season. We remove a small section of barbel from each sturgeon to obtain genetic information. This year we also tagged two sturgeon in the Winooski River and one in the Lamoille River with short lived radio transmitters to determine how long the males wait around for those illusive females. For FY2001 we plan to expand our efforts to include the Missisquoi River.