Interior view of a portable automated system to mass coded-wire tag and fin clip salmon and trout.

Optical imaging system that verifies the quality of a fin clip on a chinook salmon.

In 2005 the Council of Lakes Committees of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission asked Chuck Bronte of the Green Bay National Fish and Wildlife Conservation office to co-chair an interagency task group to develop a coordinated implementation plan for mass tagging and marking of all salmon and trout stocked in the Great Lakes. 

Tagging and marking all salmon and trout stocked will allow for better evaluation of the performance of hatchery-reared fish, the contributions to fisheries and measures of natural reproduction.  The charge to the task group was to design an implementation plan for mass marking trout and salmon that defines marking logistics and the mark-recovery and information management strategies, and  to design a strategy for coordinating hatchery operations by evaluating the logistics and costs associated with implementing mass marking at one or two hatcheries in each jurisdiction. 

After extensive research and coordinated efforts among, state, tribal and provincial agencies on the Great Lakes, the task group delivered its report to the commission in January.  The report outlines a vision to coded-wire tag and adipose fin-clip all 31 million salmonines stocked into the Great Lakes by 50 state, tribal and provincial hatcheries, and to establish a data recovery, archiving and analysis system that would serve the information needs of all Great Lakes agencies.  

Principal features of the report include: 1)  Projections of equipment, manpower and fiscal requirements to implement a basin-wide program, 2) marking and tagging scenarios by lake and species with building equipment inventories, 3) prototype schedules to move equipment and manpower across space and time to accomplish the marking objectives, 4) establishment of a Great Lakes Mass Marking Laboratory that will conduct marking and recovery in U.S. waters and provide technical and administrative support to the basin-wide program, and 5) a generalized model of a multi-agency decision committee structure that will be responsible for developing and prioritizing basin-wide, lake-wide and jurisdiction specific study questions, and a Data Standards Committee that will develop specific recommendations  for transferring and archiving data. 

The program would be operated by the Service in the United States and by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources in Canada.  Congress has provide the Service $1.7 million for FY 2008 to begin purchasing of equipment that includes a computer operated, automated tagging/marking trailer that can fin clip and tag 60,000 fish per an eight-hour shift. Nine automated trailers and four manual trailers will be needed to process all fish within the basin.