Sturgeon Voluntary Catch Reporting

Marty Gringas (Biologist for the DFG) emailed me a form that can be used to voluntarily report sturgeon catch data.  The data on this form will help them to gain more accurate abundance data on  SF Bay sturgeon poplulations.  I highly encourage each of you to keep one of these logs and send to him when you're done with Sturgeon for the year.

You can either fill out the form electronically and email it to Marty or fill it in by hand and fax or mail to him.

As far as reporting whether or not a fish was harvested, for the purposes of this data they don't really need to know (they aren't using this data to calculate a harvest rate).

This data will help to improve DFG's data on relative abundance of fish in various size-classes, how the fish are behaving relative to season and habitat, and for improving the precision of absolute (vs relative) abundance estimates.
 
As far as sexing a live fish, it's difficult to do.  If you catch a football that is obviously swelling with eggs or expelling some eggs, than you can assume it's female.  Otherwise it's anyones guess.  If you harvest the fish, you'll be able to tell if there are eggs inside.

Thanks,

Erik

Cool.. this is good.  My guess is that if everyone accurately reported what they caught, we might learn that there are more green sturgeon in the bay than previously thought.  Between Freddie, Joel, and I, we've caught 5 sturgeon .... with 4 of them being green sturgeon.  How rare can greenies really be?