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My name is Sarah Walters. I’ve been working for the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute for about eight years.
I’m working as a marine finfish biologist, so I study spawning, in particular of spotted seatrout, snook and redfish.
So this is about as small as a size trout will get in a spawning aggregation, but this is a male.
We know that because he already has his drumming muscles and I can feel them drumming in my hand.
This evening we are going out to target spawning adult spotted seatrout.
We are going to capture them in a big seine net. So we are essentially going to scoop up everything that is there
the trout, as well as little bait fish, maybe redfish, black drum - whatever happens to be in the area.
But we’re only pulling out the adult trout. And what we are doing is, we are going to measure each fish,
figure out if it is a male or female, which is really simple since they are in spawning condition, you just press on their bellies
and if it’s a female, you’ll get eggs, and if it’s a male, you’ll get milt. And then we take a fin clip
back to the lab, where our genetics team will be able to sequence the DNA to figure out the individual fish.
We are doing this simultaneously as another group at the FWRI - the fisheries independent monitoring - they're capturing juvenile fish
and collecting fin clips as well. And we want to see if we can track if those juveniles are coming from this particular spawning aggregation.
And this particular aggregation is very unique for Tampa Bay.
Typically, you’ll find spawning aggregations all throughout Tampa Bay, where you find them normally when you’re fishing.
But in this particular area, the fish seem to come every night,
throughout the whole spawning season, which usually starts in April and runs through mid-September.
And so they are here every evening and we feel that it’s a really special and very large group.
So we want to see, does this large group in this area disproportionately contribute genetically to the overall Tampa Bay population?
And that will let us know if this group really is very unique and special in terms of the overall contribution to the spotted sea trout in Tampa Bay.
You don’t usually think of them like you do, kind of the typical residential spawning aggregations, like you think of the groupers like in the Bahamas,
where they all leave an area to go to a separate area for spawning. But we do know that these fish are not here during the daytime
and they are not here outside of spawning season for the most part. So we do see an active movement to this area,
and we know that because we’ve captured them with nets; we fish when they are there and when they are not;
and then we’ve also done a lot of acoustic telemetry where we’ve captured the fish, done a little a little surgery to implant a tag,
and then left the receivers at the spot, and we see both females and males moving to and from the aggregation.
And unlike this special spot, we go back to some of these same aggregations and they would not be there every evening.
This is one of the only spots that we feel like they are there repetitively.