Back on the Genesee River

I returned to the Genesee River with help on Friday of last week (July 11 2014) and we had great success. We tagged another 250 lampreys before releasing them!

Here's a picture of Justin DiRado tagging one of our animals. The scale the animal is weighed on is in the foreground.

An up close pic of the syringe with the dye used to tag the lampreys. On the animal in the picture you can already see the orange line that was drawn first.

A fully anesthetized lamprey ready to be measured. At this point it is more of a wet noodle than a lamprey.

A close up of the oral cavity of the ammocoete with the skin exstensions that cover the oral opening to strain out the larger particles and only allow small particles in to the gill area. This animal is upside down. The muscular portion at the bottom of the picture is the oral hood, it is used to help burrow.

One of the largest (>200 mm, or >8 inches) lampreys we collected during this trip. This animal was transforming into an adult and will breed this coming spring (Spring 2015) before dying.

A work up station where animals were brought before being processed. Justin and Chris Powers are in the picture. They don't look too busy, but we were just about to clean up and head home at this point.

We only recaptured 5 of the original released animals but one of them was Brooker! Here Brooker has its marks refreshed and is then ready to recover. It was released again so hopefully it will be captured a third time. Brooker did not move from where it was released last month and only grew 2 mm, but put on 0.5g. Neither of these sound like a lot, but Brooker only weighed 5.56g, so it put on ~10% of its body weight in a month!