AGFC biologists round up Lake Erling catfish in rodeo for new study
TAYLOR – Biologists from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission spent a week in June getting a good look at the size and scope of the flathead and blue catfish swimming the waters of Lake Erling, in the southwest corner of the state. The verdict from the study is yet to be determined until samples are analyzed, but the initial view is that Lake Erling has some big catfish, to be sure.
By using electrofishing – passing pulses of electric current through the water from a boat to temporarily stun the fish, allowing them to be netted – the biologists, led by Andy Yung of the agency’s Fisheries Division District 6 in Camden, were able to take pectoral fin spine samples, which can be used to determine the age of fish, along with measurements of the length of about 400 specimens of blues and flatheads caught over a fiveday period.
“We certainly hit our goals on numbers for blue catfish, and I would have liked to have caught a few more flatheads,” Yung said, indicating that 70 flatheads made up the total haul. “But the good thing was, they were very spread out as far as length is concerned. That’s good for us when we’re doing our age-and-growth surveys. If everyone was in one size inch-group, it only tells us about that small portion of the population.
But we saw flatheads from 4 inches long out to 3 feet long. We saw a nice spread. We’ve also learned a lot for the next time we go out and do something like this.”
Spine samples taken will be studied under a microscope by the biologists to determine the fish’s age
– like trees, a fish’s spines develop a ring each year and can be cross-sectioned in the lab.
Some areas yielded some impressive flatheads, including a few in the high 600 millimeters (which ciphers out to about 25-27 inches). In another area, over a channel running through the middle of the lake, an amazing number of blue catfish surfaced, many of them weighing about a pound, in a matter of moments of the current being applied. The crew saw a few pop the surface before suddenly dozens of blues began bouncing around both boats, with skilled biologists netting six at a time in just seconds.
The shocking doesn’t harm the fish, and the taking of a spine for the study does not cause any longterm damage; the break in the skin where a spine is removed will soon heal once the fish is returned to the water.
Lake Erling, which covers about 7,000 acres and is situated a couple of miles from the Arkansas-louisiana border, or 14 miles south of Lewisville to its northern tip, is owned by the Shreveport-based American Gamebird Research Education and Development Foundation. It’s previous owner for six decades was International Paper Co., which built it to provide a water source for a former mill in Springhill, Louisiana, just across the state line. This study of flathead and blue catfish was the first there since the AGFC took a look in 2014, according to Yung.
Electrofishing is not a new concept for the AGFC’S Fisheries Division, but the equipment now being used is. A high-tech machine called “The Infinity Box,” a newer version made by a different company than previous equipment has literally infinite frequency settings to control current output for electrofishing. The 2014 study at Erling didn’t have that equipment, and it was also conducted as a random sampling of the lake ostensibly to determine density as well as size and age of fish, but few fish were caught, including just 10 flatheads. This study, by comparison, collected more than six times the total number of fish, Yung said. But the new study was in search of raw data rather than a density of fish in the lake, hence areas of Erling were not randomly selected.
“At some point you have to sacrifice random site selection to go out and get enough fish to gather some data,” Yung explained. “If you have a baseline data set and you say, ‘This is where the growth is at,’ then you can progress to some of these random samples and we can use our catch rates and say, ‘We need to do this many electrofishing runs when we’re random sampling to get the amount of the fish we need.’ And you can build from there.
“This is kind of the first stepping stone to just let us get a handle on what’s going on. We haven’t been out there for five years or so, six years, and we’re just trying to get baseline information on some fish that we know are popular. There are a lot of catfish anglers out there.”
When Yung says “out there,” he means statewide and beyond, not just at Lake Erling. He notes that the research of catfish has taken a big leap in recent years with the AGFC and nationally. Jason Olive, AGFC’S assistant chief of Fisheries, said, “Due to the sampling methods required to collect catfish being much different than those used for most scaled fish like bass and crappie, there has been a lag nationwide in studying and understanding catfish populations as well as we do some other popular sportfish species. AGFC Fisheries Division communicates regularly with surrounding states on all sorts of issues, and catfish sampling has been a hot topic in those discussions over the last 10 years.”
So, the AGFC since about 2012, Olive said, has put much more effort into its catfish program and research. Also, earlier this year, Little Rock played host to the 3rd International Catfish Symposium, a conference held every 10 years, where fisheries managers and researchers from across the U.S. and Mexico came together for two days to share the latest research on catfish. Most of the attendees were biologists from state game and fish agencies who were there to share findings from work in their state and to learn from biologists from other states.
“Almost all of our management biologists attended this conference, not because they had to, but because they wanted to learn about the latest science and techniques to make sure that we are on the cutting edge of catfish management,” Olive said.
The research and reports are helping to change the public’s long-held perception of catfish as merely bottom feeders, but longtime catfish anglers already know what a great meal they can provide, particularly flatheads, and many enjoy the sport of fishing for catfish just like bass and crappie anglers do.
Bass and crappie have long been randomly electrofished in Arkansas lakes for density estimates and other studies that required large samples in a short amount of time. Bass and crappie are electro-fished with a higher frequency rate of pulse; because they don’t have scales, catfish are given a low-frequency current, Yung said. A large number of bass or crappie can be collected in a day; catfish are often deeper and don’t come up as frequently.
Catfish, particularly channel catfish, are also regularly sampled with hoop nets. While the particular lowfrequency pulses now used for electrofishing catfish do not appear to stun channel catfish, they affect flatheads and blues. The biggest difference, though, between bass or crappie electrofishing and using the method for flatheads and blues is that these catfish species will disperse away from the shocking boat rather than surfacing and being netted right in front, the biologists say.
Hence, fishing for flatheads and blues requires a “chase” boat trailing the shocking boat, to help net catfish popping up sometimes as far as 50-75 yards away.
As Colton Dennis, one of the AGFC biologists in the sampling, described it: “It’s a rodeo out there.”
Fascinating news from The New York Times this week! Reviewing its op-ed titled
“I’m a Direct Descendant of Thomas Jefferson. Take Down His Memorial,” I gather we now weigh Americans’ opinions based on who their ancestors are.
I’m not sure that’s a good idea, but the rules are the rules. Otherwise, why would the Times consider it so important to publish Lucian Truscott, a great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Jefferson, at all? Blut uber alles! Obviously, we’re going to need a list of Whose Opinion Matters. Here’s my first stab at it:
Descendants of John Adams will have their views count the most. Adams was a giant of the Revolution, our second president, and never owned slaves.
Descendants of George Washington will come next. Some will bicker with this, inasmuch as he is the father of our country, but based on our new standards, he gets demerits for owning slaves -- though, unlike Jefferson, at least he freed them on his death. (This is a freebie: Washington’s only child was the United States of America.)
Someone else can fill in the middle range in the Whose Opinion Matters ranking -- this is taking a while.
Toward the bottom of the list will be descendants of slave traders, then of slave owners, and below that, descendants of slave owners who pretend to be embarrassed about that fact, but are just bragging, like Truscott.
I Got Double 800s on the SATS. I Think Colleges Should Drop the SAT.
I’m an Olympic Gold Medalist. I Think We Should Ban the Olympics.
I’m Totally Hot. I Think Men Should Stop Hitting on Hot Girls.
Next in the Eminence Ranking will be immigrants (themselves often descendants of slave owners, murderers and rapists). In fact, immigrants may as well not say anything. Their opinions will amount to only about one one-trillionth of a foundational American’s.
Dead last are the blood relations of traitors and anarchists, such as the grandchildren of the hundreds of Soviet spies infiltrating our government during the Cold War, especially any heirs of Alger Hiss, the Weathermen and their children. That wipes out half of our college professors.
I’m surprised at the Times adopting a blood test, but you can’t go around publishing some blowhard demanding we take down a monument based on his ancestry and then drop the ancestry advantage for everyone else.
Speaking as the direct descendant of 13 patriots of the American Revolution, a few Union Soldiers and several strict Presbyterian abolitionists, it’s obvious that my opinion carries vastly more weight than the blood relation of a slave owner, like Truscott.
With full knowledge of the responsibility that comes with that, I say we keep the Jefferson Memorial.
Obviously, I don’t need any reasons beyond the fact that my ancestors are better than Truscott’s. But if you’d care to hear my arguments, they are that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence; he was our third president; he went to war with the Barbary pirates, who kidnapped more than a million Europeans and forced them into slavery; the monument is a work of art; and -- most important -- removing the Jefferson Memorial would deprive me of a reason to write periodic columns saying ...
... Thomas Jefferson fathered none of Sally Hemings’ children.
Here’s the Clip-and-save version: We know from the DNA that Jefferson couldn’t have fathered Hemings’ firstborn, Tom. Only her lastborn son, Eston, had the DNA from some Jefferson male, of which there were at least a half-dozen living at or near Monticello when Eston was conceived.
So it all comes down to Eston. There is zero evidence that Jefferson fathered him and boatloads of evidence that he didn’t.
1) Five years before Eston was born, a muckraking journalist, James Callender, furious with Jefferson for not making him a postmaster, started the rumor the president had fathered Hemings’ son Tom, which, again, the DNA proves he did not. So the theory is: Five years after being falsely accused of fathering children with Hemings, Jefferson went out and fathered a child with Hemings.
2) Eston was born in 1808, when Thomas Jefferson was 64 years old and in his second term as president. His brother Randolph was 52, recently widowed and unmarried. After Randolph remarried, Hemings had no more children.
3) Randolph’s five sons, aged 17 to 24, were also frequent visitors to Monticello when Eston was conceived.
4) While Jefferson was entertaining diplomats in the main house, Randolph would typically retire to the slave quarters for the evening. One slave, Isaac Granger Jefferson, described Randolph in his dictated memoirs thus: “Old Master’s brother, Mass Randall, was a mighty simple man: used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.”
5) There is not a single account of Thomas Jefferson visiting the slave quarters.
6) Nor did Jefferson take any interest in Hemings’ children. Randolph did, teaching all of Hemings’ sons to play the fiddle.
7) None of the private correspondence from anyone living at Monticello credited the rumor about Jefferson and Hemings -- but several pointed to Randolph.
8) In private letters, Jefferson denied Callender’s claim, while admitting to a sexual indiscretion that would have been more shameful at the time: his seduction of a friend’s wife.
9) Jefferson’s private papers reveal his extremely negative views of miscegenation in terms so brutal they will not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that the idea of his fathering a child with Hemings is inconceivable.
10) Jefferson did not free Hemings in his will, despite freeing several other slaves.
11) The claim that Jefferson fathered Hemings’ children originated in the brains of feminists. At first, historians strenuously objected, but eventually decided the better part of valor was to cower under their desks and pray no one accused them of “racism.”
To every cloud there is a silver lining, and the one to the Times’ Ancestry Test for Political Relevance is that we’ll never again have to hear from a professor or student at Yale, a school whose namesake -- currently, right now, in 2020 -- is Elihu Yale, slave trader.