The Strange and Bizarre: Fish #2104

Last week I received a message that someone had information about a transmitter. When I arrived in the office the next day I picked up the phone and called the number. The gentleman answered and I knew immediately the fish must have come from the Ottawa River. Sure enough, he told me his father-in-law was ice fishing and found a muskie washed up on shore (dead) at Petrie Island on the Ottawa River. As he recited the tag number and a serial number (first red flag) I realized something was wrong.

I hung up and flipped open my Excel spreadsheet for radio tagged muskies from 2009. The number he gave me was 2104... 2104, 2104, 2104. "Where is it? Wait, what the heck?" I closed that Excel spreadsheet and opened another: 2010 acoustic transmitter fish. Yep, there it was staring me in the face. 2104 was caught on June 15th, 2010 from the Rideau River, the only site we tagged fish with acoustic transmitters.

So, in order for this fish to have been tagged in the Rideau and make it all the way down to Petrie Island it would have had to travel approximately 26 miles. It's not a straight shot though; the fish would have had to negotiate four locks or three locks and a waterfall. After it successfully negotiated all that, then it would have had to swim another 11 miles to the island area.

The fish was last located on September 19th at the most upstream acoustic receiver in our Rideau study site. If it were swimming downstream we would have picked up its signal at each receiver as it swam downstream, or if not all receivers then at least some. However, the data show that the fish remained between only two (of nine) receivers for the duration of the study.

I'm wondering if an angler caught the fish and transported it into the Ottawa River. Why? Who knows. It's quite an unfortunate move. Unless the angler comes forward we'll never know for sure what happened to the fish. Nevertheless, it sure makes for an interesting story!