[Carptracker]

Not one of mine. There might be some of my tagged fish out there still, and if they are, I would definitely make it worth your while to get the tags back to me. It would come out of my own pocket, because apparently it's not legal for some reason for the feds to offer a reward on tagged fish, but believe me I would LOVE to get some of those fish tagged ten years ago back in my lab. And it would be worth more than 50 bucks to me. Mostly, I want a little white or green thimble-shaped tag from inside the fish. These fish were radio-tagged orginally, and we planned to recapture them. We found out that Asian carp, once captured in a net, are VERY good at not getting it done to them twice. We have only a few fish of each species that we were able to recapture, and every additional fish is more information. There were two tags inserted into the belly of each fish, one was the radio/acoustic tag to help me track the fish, and the other was a device that records depth and temperature, but you have to be able to catch the fish to get the data. If you catch a bighead or silver carp that has what looks like a piece of monofilament hanging from its belly, that is the antenna. I'd like to get the whole fish back, but what I want the most is that little archival tag. That's what I would pay for.

 

[Carptracker]

By the way, that looks like a skinny bighead. Are all the ones you are shooting looking like that, or is this one maybe skinny because of the mouth jewelry?

 

[Carptracker]

Yeah, competition with the silvers is definitely hard on the bighead carp. Silvers can eat smaller plankton, so they get it before it gets big enough for the bigheads, essentially.

 

[Carptracker]

This is pretty sweet. Put your $$$ amount bounty out there Carp Tracker might get some people willing to travel lol this is pretty kick @ss

Well, I gave a commercial fisherman a hundred bucks worth of gear for one a few years ago. I could probably go there again, at least. They have my contact info on them, if you get one. But you have to cut the fish open to find them. All you see on the outside of the fish is the antenna - which is a thin plastic-coated wire. Looks like mono at first glance, if the mono has not worn off and left the exposed wire by now. Actually, I expect most of the fish to have died by now, or to have expelled the tags. Sometimes that happens when fish are tagged - they can expel the tag through the body wall and heal around it. These ought to be big fish by now - I tagged the last one almost ten years ago, and they were all adult fish then.

 

[Carptracker]

Thats really cool that you do this carp tracker. I bet you have a kick @ss job. If they have trackers how come you never went back for them? I guess over this many years the trackers no longer work? I would have been more than happy for ya'll to use the tracker and found the fish I would have shot them for ya :hb: lol. I hope someone see's this and if they happen to shoot one of your fish you get your stuff back.

We put a lot of effort into trying to recapture the fish and only got 7, counting one by the commercial fisher. Of those, one tag malfunctioned and had no data. The commercial fisher got one too soon after we put it in, so data questionable. Hard to publish data on 2 or 3 fish per species. Sure like to have more data, but the transmitters died after a year, which is long life for a fish transmitter. But the archival tag data will always be good if we somehow ever got the tag. It would have stopped recording long ago, but should retain the data.

 

[Carptracker]

What states or lakes did you put them in??

Lower Missouri River, and also the Lamine River. The way these fish get around, they could be anywhere connected to the Mississippi River by now.