On Sunday 03 October 2004 6:51 pm, Jim Speaker wrote: > I saw around twenty rotting chinook carcasses. Some of them had their > tails cut off. Is this where they get tagged? At first I just thought it > was odd but when I saw that about half of them were like this I figured it > was probably WDFW collecting tags.
Its probably for genetic testing. The tail makes a lovely thing to chop off, drop in a bag to bring back to the lab. The typical tag is put in the nose of the fish. And when a fish biologist finds a tagged fish, the need to take the whole head, a much more gorey affair. I had to work with a fish biologist last winter GPSing chinook on Bear Creek. It was fairly gross. Rob -- One reason Paul caught more fish than anyone else was that he had his flies in the water more than anyone else. "Brother," he would say, "there are�no flying fish in Montana. Out here, you can't catch fish with your flies in the air." "A River Runs Through It"
