Michael Hanowski

DNR Fisheries Internship

May-August 2019

05/13/19
Today was my first day on the job in the local DNR office. I was showed around the
office and met mostly everyone in every division. Eric showed me the dos and don’ts of the
operation and what goes on in the office every day. After we got some of those formalities out
of the way, we headed up to Brainerd to pick up walleye fry from the hatchery. At the hatchery,
they have a very specific type of plumbing in order to have success. They start out in cylindrical
clear containers with an aerator as eggs. When they start to hatch the swim up and over all the
other eggs where they get sucked out of the container by the overflow at the top of the container.
Once left there they go down a series of drains and end up in a bulk tank where they can later be
seined out and put in to jugs. This is where we come pick them up and load them into our boats.
This specific day we got a million walleye fry in 10 jugs (100,000 per jug). After that, we
headed over to Fish Trap Lake where we dumped the boat in the water and headed to the middle
of the lake where there is the least amount of predation and still enough zoo plankton to feed on.
There we offloaded the fry into the lake and went back to the office to square away some
paperwork.

05/14/19
On this day we went to Round Lake, which is on the border of Morrison county and
Crow Wing county. On this day we were electro-shocking the lake for bass. Electro-shocking is
where you have two big anodes in the water and put an electric current in the water which
temporarily stuns the fish. We shocked quite a few bass and there were quite a few crappies as
well. We also kept about three of everything we caught because Eric my supervisor needed fish
for a couple aquariums for presentations he had later that week. After we were done shocking
and tending to fish, we headed back to the office where we put the fish in a bulk tank and I did
more New Employee Training.

05/15/19
On this day we went electro-shocking again, but this time on Mille Lake by Lake Beauty.
We were shocking for bass again but there were an exponential amount of crappies. We
probably shocked over 500 crappies that day. After we made our rounds for bass around the
lake, we went back to shock some crappies to take their otoliths. An otolith is a bone in the
fish’s skull that helps with sound and vibration in the water. By taking this bone out, we can age
the fish. The reason that we were interested in the age structure of this lake for crappie is because
the fish don’t ever really seem to get very large but they seem to think that these smaller fish a
quite old. Another thing that I learned is that we were elector-shocking for bass in all these lakes
because Eric wants to present a case to the district manager on why he thinks we should have a
catch and release season on bass year round, and this data that we are sampling will help him
drive his point home.

05/16/19
On this day, we went electro-shocking again and this time we went to a lake that is very
close to my house, Green Prairie Fish Lake. Again we were sampling for bass, but this time we
were not only sizing the fish, but we were doing a mark and recapture. This was the second time
that the DNR staff sampled the lake for this season so they already marked quite a few fish. We
Caught around 120 fish in total and I believe around 10-15 of those were recaptures. So what
happens is you go to a lake and sample the whole lake the first time and every fish that you catch
you “mark” by cutting one of the anal fins as well as tallying how many you caught and marked.
The second time you come to sample, you again mark all the fish that aren’t already marked but
don’t cut the ones that are “recaptured”. A recapture is a fish that you shock and net that was
previously caught and marked in a previous sample. Once you sample two or three times, you
put your numbers of captured and recaptured in to an algorithm to find out a population estimate.
I have done similar population estimates with Sherman Traps with small mammals in my High
School natural Resource Management class.

05/17/19
On Friday of my first week, we did……yep you guessed it: Electro-fished. I definitely
did not mind doing the same thing over and over throughout the week as it has all been so new to
me, and you really can’t beat standing in a boat all day sampling fish and seeing all kinds of
wildlife. This day we electro-fished Big Lake near Cushing. Again we were sampling for bass
but also saw lots of crappies and bluegills. We made it all the way around the lake again as
usual, but after we got done measuring the fish the motor wouldn’t start. Luckily the access
wasn’t too far from where we were as we had made a complete loop around the lake but it
definitely was an inconvenience. We ASSUMED that it was a battery issue so we threw the
battery on the charger and left it for the weekend. When we got back to the office we fixed some
trap nets as I was taught how to do that earlier that week.

05/20/19
The second week started with electro-fishing because the weather is not looking good for
the rest of the week. So we are hoping to get in our shocking before it gets crumby out. They
had me check the batteries that morning to see if they were good to go but the battery that “died”
when we were fishing last Friday was at 50%. We brought a battery pack just in case it should
die. We got to Green Prairie for our third sampling total, my second time, and the motor
wouldn’t even tilt. We checked the connections and the fuses and they all looked fine so we
took it to Staples Water Sports where they took a look at it and one of the fuses that we checked
that looked fine actually wasn’t and he changed it out and the motor would tilt. So now that we
are farther north, we decided to go to Pine Island Lake first as it was closer. We got to the access
and backed the boat in the water and the motor would turn over and over and over and over but
wouldn’t start. For 15 minutes we tried to start this thing and ended up taking off the cover again
and looking at the fuses. The mechanic put in a 20 amp fuse instead of a 10 amp fuse which was
the right size it needed, so we bought some fuses that were 10 amp just in case something should
happen. So while we had the cover off trying to start it, we thought we might as well put in that
10 amp fuse to make sure we don’t short anything out. We put the new fuse in and it fired up
after about the third turn-over of the engine.
Anyway, after we had all those complications we finally made it out on Pine Island and
we shocked the entire lake and got about 60ish fish. There were quite a few crappies and big
bluegills in the lake as well. After we got off of Pine Island, we headed over to Green Prairie to
do my second sampling there and the team’s third sample. We shocked around 66 bass, 9 of
which were recaptures.

05/21/19
Today was kind of a late start as our morning meeting went a little longer than usual,
mostly because we were trying to decide what we were going to do for the day and how to
effectively execute those objectives. We were waiting to hear back from a private hatchery on
when he was going to be able to bring their surplus of fry to the lake we were to stock. The
office was kind of upset with this because they said they wouldn’t be able to meet for another 4
hours which was absurd and really didn’t help us with our planning of the day. We ended up
going up to Round Lake on the border of Morrison and Crow Wing County to pick up and reset
trap nets. This is the first time I got to do this this year. We went up there and pulled the nets for
what was inside and then reset them to check them again tomorrow. We caught a lot of bluegills
and crappie and bowfin and a nice walleye as well. We took 33 otolith from the Bluegills for
aging. After we emptied and reset the nets, we headed over to Sullivan Lake to retrieve and
empty fry from that private hatchery. All went well and took all but 20 minutes.
A couple of side notes on a personal note about the job. Al said that he is not sure that
this information is really doing anything and that some of these bluegill fisheries can be very
fragile and by killing some of these larger fish he worries about the fishery. He also made a
comment on the way home that struck me, “Man we really made a difference today.”
(Sarcastically). Also found it very interesting that the time mentality in the office is very
interesting. We try to make everything in the boat go for quickly and efficiently but yet once we
hit the road we take every possible back road.
05/22/19
I got to the office this morning in an absolute downpour. In our morning meeting, Brady
brought up the fact that he saw something on the news stating that people’s lake homes are
losing property to high waters and that everyone was turning to one rip-rap company to help
reduce the impacts. The office was irate about it because people should be planting natural
vegetation to help erosion opposed to putting rock and rip rap there. They also said that those
news stations should be coming through us to give natural alternatives instead of promoting
destroying natural habitat for the lake.
The rest of the day we went back up to round lake to collect fish out of our trap nets and
also pick up all of our trap nets. It was just Al and I on this adventure and we had some good
discussion on where I want to end up after college and where I want to end up geographically.

05/23/19
Today we got out electro-fishing again but this time it was on the mighty Mississippi
River. This was unlike any other electro-shocking we have done the past couple weeks. We
went right up to Blanchard dam on the downstream side. We caught a lot of different fish
including buffalo carp, walleye, pike, Muskie, small mouth bass, crappie, channel catfish, and a
variety of suckers. The water was flowing so fast and it was so wavy that I felt like I was on one
of those crabbing episodes on the ocean. We took just over 50 otoliths from Small mouths and
about 50 walleye samples as well.

05/24/19
This morning in our morning meeting we talked about new research that is out there,
specifically from my school at NDSU, on age structures of buffalo carp. The study shows
evidence that buffalo carp can reach ages of 112 and more. I found this quite interesting. Today
was quite uneventful, I stayed in the office today as Steve, Al and Brady wet back out on the
Mississippi again but on a different stretch this time. So I cleaned a boat that was to be picked
up by some Brainerd interns. I also took out the old water pump that was in the boat as we are
going to reuse that pump for one of the other smaller boats. I also accomplished by Watercraft
Safety training.