Nine Volunteers tag close to 1,100 sturgeon at the Genoa Fish Hatchery on April 2.  The sturgeon are assigned for the Chippewa Indian Tribe in Northern Wisconsin for their tribal harvest and fishery.

“Since they have started this stocking program some years ago, the tribe has only claimed one sturgeon.” Explains Ann, a staff member of the U.S. Fish and Wild Life Service.  There are many factors that contribute to the poor harvest of the sturgeon. Equipment to harvest sturgeon is very expensive and the poverty rate in Northern Wisconsin is very high; also it has been many years and generations since the tribe has been able to harvest sturgeon, many of the traditional ways of sturgeon harvest are forgotten; lastly, the depth of the Chippewa lakes are deeper than the more common sturgeon harvesting location of Lake Winnebago.  The Chippewa Nation is allowed to harvest 100 sturgeon each year.

Tagging a sturgeon is relatively easy, the sturgeon are injected with an electronic tag- very similar to what a pet identifier is, then the tag is activated with a magnetic wand that assigns the tag with a number, then the fish is released back into the fish tank. During the tagging process, sturgeon are randomly selected to be measured.  The tag number is logged on a data sheet for future reference.

When the sturgeon are caught in the future, the agent will have a very similar wand that will detect the tag number and the agent will know the location and batch the sturgeon came from and the growth of the sturgeon over time.