Study tracking fish movement between local lakes

By Forrest Adams

Early in the morning and late at night fish are on the move between Lake Susan and Rice Marsh Lake, according to Chris Chizinski from the Sorenson Lab in the University of Minnesota.

Every day since April 1 Chizinski, a post-graduate, and his technician, Mary Headrick, have been counting and studying fish at four different experiment sites in Chanhassen and Eden Prairie. Two of the sites involve Lake Susan. The others involve Rice Marsh Lake and Lake Riley.

They’re the latest manifestation of Professor Peter Sorenson’s ongoing efforts to coordinate and promote techniques to manage and control common carp using Lake Susan, Lake Riley, Rice Marsh Lake and the streams between them as an experiment area. It’s Chizinski’s and Headrick’s job to monitor the fish and record their movements.

“We’re studying the movement of carp and other fish between the lakes,” Chizinski said. “There really isn’t much information in scientific literature about (carp) movement between lakes and the timing and environmental correlations of it all.”

Other team members are performing different aspects of the research. For example, Prezemek Bajer is looking at young carp in different lakes and how their population correlates with the number of game fish in the lakes.

Stream research

On Monday morning, in the stream between Lake Susan and Rice Marsh Lake, the researchers found five northern pike and tagged the fish before releasing them.

To tag a fish, they stun it temporarily, insert a small device into the fish and attach one to the fish’s fin, which will give off a frequency when it passes under a small electronic tag reader set farther upstream.

“We’ve been putting those in pike and carp, so we can find the time of day they’re using the streams,” said Chizinski.

Unexpectedly, they’re finding similar behaviors between pike and carp in that each species swims to Rice Marsh Lake to spawn and then returns to Lake Susan. He said the same thing happens between Lake Riley and Rice Marsh Lake.

Fish traps and fish barriers are in the stream to help with the research. Traps are wooden screen boxes that fish swim into and can’t swim out of. The temporary barriers will be up until September. A barrier consists of PVC tubes, staked into the ground
with poles pounded several feet deep, and sand bags stacked against it to prevent the carp from digging underneath it.

Readers can contact Forrest Adams at fadams@swpub.com.