This is how you deal with an invasive species

My buddy Chuck sent me an email with the same title and the following picture. He caught those rusties near his home town of Green Lake. They're mean buggers, a lot more aggressive than other crayfish species.

He said they were delicious. :)

Spring is here!

Highs were in the low 70's today, and I did my best to make the most of it. The big lakes were too murky to catch anything, but the lagoon in Vilas Park was doing just fine. There's never anything big in there, but I had a good time catching small sunfish. Caught a total of 11 bluegill and 4 pumpkinseeds. I could see bass and a couple muskies swimming around, but they had their minds on other things (and aren't legal to fish for yet).



This time of year there is always a crowd of people at the dam separating Wingra Creek from Lake Wingra. There is a sign up that says no fishing allowed, so why are they there? The muskies are trying to jump up the dam to make their way to spawning grounds in Lake Wingra! The following two pics are of a musky swimming under the creek side of the dam, and one that made it over the waterfall and was building up courage to swim the rest of the way to the lake side of the dam.

Rainbow darter

Traveled down to visit my parents in central Illinois on Saturday. They have two streams running through the back of their property, and I wandered back there to see what fish I could catch with an old butterfly net I found in the garage. The larger of the two streams seems to be doing very well! I caught plenty of minnows, chubs, and dace, as well as a handful of rainbow darters. I really wanted to take them back to Madison to add to the 10 gallon aquarium with the sticklebacks and sculpins, but I didn't think they'd last the trip without an aerator. I'll find a good battery powered one before I go down there next, probably in May.

Mottled Sculpin

My first collecting trip! (Not counting the hundreds I did as a kid in Illinois.) Chuck and I drove west of Madison today to see what we could find in the creeks around the area. Unfortunately, most of the decent streams are designated trout streams, where netting is prohibited. We used a game/fishing map of WI of Chuck's to find some smaller creeks off the beaten path to try.

Mottled sculpin were the fish of the day! We caught 5 of them at the first stream, and 2 more at another. We also caught 1 brook stickleback. You can see most of them in the picture below, along with a few bait shop minnows.

My next task will be to get the small tank set up better for these guys since I'm going to keep them for a long time. I'll add more rocks and fake plants to give them plenty of cover. Hopefully Chuck and I will be able to find some more interesting species to put in there in the future (logperch, darters, dace, etc).



Update 4/3/09 - I moved all of the bait shop minnows to the big tank so the sticklebacks and sculpins will have more space. The sculpins are doing great. They aren't territorial (yet?) and even like to sit close together. They've been eating flake food and small pieces of nightcrawlers. The two sticklebacks swim around together part of the time, but fight each other at other times. They nip at each other's fins, something that you'll hear a lot about on forums. One of the sticklebacks ate a piece of nightcrawler as well, but they haven't touched the flake food.