Technician Adam McDaniel releases a pallid sturgeon back into the Missouri River.

Technician Chris McLeland and volunteer Marie Delatour deploy trotlines at sunset on the Missouri River.

After a particularly raw day of sampling on the Missouri River, I sat on my couch staring at the TV. My face was stinging from being sandblasted with sleet and snow pellets and a 40 mph northwest wind.  I was watching, in disbelief, a commercial for a spa touting facial dermabrasion. “You have got to be kidding me!” I exclaimed.  “I just got paid to do this to my face and it feels miserable - there is absolutely NO way I would pay someone to do it to me!” In a nutshell, the fall/winter weather was rather unrelenting for Columbia NFWCO crews sampling on the Missouri River.

Coupled with our standard sampling for the Pallid Sturgeon Population Assessment Program (PSA), we have been systematically sampling two segments of the lower Missouri River with trotlines.  We are evaluating the effectiveness of trotlines for catching sturgeon, particularly the federally endangered pallid sturgeon. River segments defined by the PSA program have been subdivided into “reaches.”  In general, each reach encompasses roughly 20 miles (approximately 8 bends) that are sampled from downstream to upstream within a week. This design addresses the potential for baited hooks acting as an attractant and allows crews to more efficiently sample stretches of river. Based on pallid sturgeon trotline catch in 2008, a model was developed to predict the number of hooks necessary for detecting a pallid sturgeon in a bend. The model predicted 14 hooks per tenth of river mile were needed to have an 80% chance of catching a pallid sturgeon. We intend to test this prediction by sampling 250 river miles, from the confluence with the Mississippi to the Grand River, during the 2009 sample year.