A Wildlife Person’s Perspective on Fisheries as a DNR Fisheries Intern

Written by Timothy Vang, Increasing Diversity in Environmental Careers Fellow in 2024.

 

Introduction

Heya!

My name is Tim, and I am currently attending my senior year at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, majoring in Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology (emphasis on wildlife). I have worked with the Conservation Corps of Minnesota and Iowa during my freshman year and was part of the IDEC program during my sophomore year as a member of Cohort 4. Just to put this out there as well, I am more of a mammal person than a fish person.

The reason why I am writing this blog post is because I’ve had the incredible opportunity to intern with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources’ Fisheries Division this summer. Initially, I intended on becoming a wildlife intern, but because I would rather stay home with my family and not commute 2+ hours away to live in a dorm, I am instead a fisheries intern. Close enough, right?

Anyway, for some quick context on my position, one of the critical issues the Fisheries Department addresses is the threat posed by invasive carp. These non-native species, including silver carp and bighead carp, pose significant risks to native fish populations and aquatic habitats. This is because they solely devour plankton, which is essential to the health of Minnesota’s rivers, such as the Mississippi and St. Croix. During my internship, I have been involved in some projects aimed at monitoring, controlling, and mitigating the impact of these invasive carp species; however, I have been thrown around doing whatever work is assigned to me day-to-day.

Nevertheless, the point of this blog post is to provide an overview of my internship experience, discuss one project that I did, and discuss what experience may have sparked personal interest.

Overview

Before I get into the meat of this internship, allow me to share some of my initial impressions. During my first few weeks, I found the department to be an organized mess. Imagine this: you know exactly who to report to, what work to expect, and where everything is; however, you have absolutely zero clue as to what is going to happen today or next. Nearing the end of my internship, I can safely say that this is a daily occurrence, and everyone goes along with it. I should also mention that your training only occurs in the field, with you having to learn quite literally everything without being on a dedicated training course.

Now, I know all of this sounds like a recipe for disaster or a crappy internship experience, but honestly, I found myself enjoying all of this because it breaks from the mold of a standard, formal work environment that some might find suffocating. Everything is informal and spontaneous, with you learning things quickly in an environment that doesn’t require you to meet a strict deadline or arbitrary policies that state you must do x and/or y because z. This position and the people here put you as an individual before the work instead of vice versa. It’s a frontline position without having to worry about your superiors breathing down your necks. Overall, it is very flexible, and this has led to a super chill and lax work environment, which is honestly quite surprising in this current age.

Moving onto the work, here is what a typical day looks like: you walk into the office and sit in your assigned cubicle space until you are called to do something or do some small work assigned to you. There will be days where you sit down doing absolutely nothing or small work for 1-3 hours until you’re finally called. When this happens, you have to go to the garage and load up any required equipment and/or the boat itself before someone more experienced than you drives you out to a body of water to do some work.

This will be the truck you will be taking every single day and you’ll almost always be towing a boat. Depending on the day, you can be driving either for as little as 20–40 minutes or for as long as 1-3 hours away from the office. Since I was part of the invasive carp crew, there have been a handful of times where I had to suffer these 2-3 hour drives to Southeast Minnesota, but honestly, I ended up getting used to them. Now, depending on the work, there will be moments where the work can be as little as three hours long before you head back or as long as five. Most days, though, you will be able to get back to the office early, or at least before the day officially ends at 3:30 PM. If you were fortunate enough to get back early, you have the option to leave early (assuming you have a solid reason to) or do some office work to pass the time until it’s time to go.

When it comes to work diversity, in my experience, there have been a moderate amount of things to do. Personally, the most common things I have done are gillnetting and fish tracking.

This photo comes from a couple of hours of gillnetting at the dam in Hastings in search of paddlefish and carp; however, we only caught a bunch of shovelnose sturgeon. Gillnetting requires you to throw a giant net into a specific area and then pull it up after a certain amount of time has passed to see what fish have been caught in it. You will catch all kinds of fish, from massive sturgeon and paddlefish to tiny bluegills and crappies, in these nets.

 

On the left is the VR100 receiver, while on the right is a cord that connects the receiver to the hydrophone that detects tags in the water. Fish tracking is by far the most relaxing thing you’ll do since you’ll be doing no physical work. However, it’s also the most boring thing you will do, as you will sit on a boat for hours on end using a VR100 receiver to scan for fish tags.

After this, it’s probably larval trawling, which is where you collect samples from the Mississippi River using a net attached to a boat to fill up sample jars. The point of this is to find larval fish in said jars, which will result in you meticulously sifting through debris to find baby fish to fill up tiny vials back in the office’s lab for report reasons.

All the little green things you see here are fish larvae and there are more than 20 in this vial. This sounds easy, but depending on how filled the jars are, this can be short and take up to 30 minutes or long and take up to 1-2 hours per jar. If the sores on your neck and arms don’t encourage you to eventually take a break, the heavy stench of ethanol will.

 A Specific Task

However, out of all of these, by far the funnest task I have done is electrofishing from a boat. It’s a three-person job where one drives a massive boat and activates a generator while two other people stand on these yellow pads at the front of the boat to stun fish before scooping them up with long nets.  I have scooped up bass that were 15+ inches long and walleyes that were 25+ inches long.

The record we have found so far is a 29-inch walleye in Mississippi. Nevertheless and to be utterly frank, it is a bit painful to watch since you will see fish panicking and showing signs of getting hurt. However, I can attest the damage is not too bad, and finding massive fish is just amazing.

Now, I understand the use of electrofishers can be a bit controversial, but this is done for a few good reasons. One, we need to electrofish in deep water. Two, invasive carp are primarily found in the Mississippi, and so a boat is needed. And three, we may need to catch fish for the State Fair, and the only exciting fish are found in deep water. In short, we use a giant boat of electrocution because we have to, rather than because we want to shock fish.

A Spark of Personal Interest

Although I spend most of my days being delegated to general work, every time I have to do something like gill-netting or fish tracking, the main focus is to hopefully catch a silver or bighead carp by the end of the day. When I was about a month and a half in, I had yet to see any invasive carp up close and was a little worried I would never be able to handle one by the end of the summer. Everyone is talking about catching a carp, or they hope to get a glimpse of one just to confirm their presence. It’s like bigfoot, almost, but instead of hiding in the woods, it’s in the brown murk of the Mississippi. Eventually, this sparked me to do some personal research into why they’re so sought after by the DNR. In short, they are terrible because they only consume a lot of plankton. They outcompete native fish such as paddlefish, and they lead to increased chances of algal blooms and water turbidity (water cloudiness or murkiness).

Thankfully, on July 30, near Pig’s Eye at a place called Hogs Lake, we caught not one, two, or even three carp, but six silver carp. Unfortunately, I was only able to get a photo of one since I was too caught up in the work to get more.

My Takeaways

With my overall experience out of the way, I guess now is the time where I reflect and discuss my takeaways from this position. Starting off with the latter, the skills you learn from this position are extremely useful in the general sense. You not only learn how to load and unload a boat but also how to properly operate, tow, and more importantly, back it up with a truck. If you already know how to do all of this, then that’s great! But if you came into this knowing absolutely nothing like me, then you’ll learn an important skill if you ever find yourself using or owning a boat. Some more examples of these include fish identification, properly handling a fish, knowing how to securely tie ropes and nets, and plenty more that I am struggling a bit to recall. All in all, the skills you will end up learning are physical, but you can apply them almost anywhere.

I wouldn’t say that I grew significantly personally and professionally over the course of this internship, but I definitely grew more “worldly” by the end of it. As someone who spends 95% of their free time cooped up indoors when I have no work to do, I am grateful for having the opportunity to learn hard skills that I can find myself using if I ever find myself outside.

It’s because of these outdoor experiences that I find moments where I go out for almost the entire day to be the best part and those where I come back early to be the worst. Initially I always hoped to get back early so that I could potentially leave early, but I eventually came to the slow realization that spending the remainder of the day at the office is a massive drag. It really does stink doing 5-6 hours of physical work and being outside when it’s 80+ °F, but time passes by quickly and you’ll both learn and see a fair number of interesting things. The office is nice and constantly has the AC on, but you’ll be stuck doing menial but somewhat interesting labor to pass time. You may have a different opinion, and that’s perfectly fine, but if you are considering this internship, please be aware of what you want to do and are willing to tolerate day-to-day.

Finally, just to restate this fact: I intended to get into a wildlife position, and fisheries never really crossed my mind as a potential path. Sure, I like fishing and eating them, but on a personal level, I didn’t really care. When the IDEC program required me to choose a position, it was more or less my second-best choice since it was the only other position that involved anything relating to wildlife. However, after 2-3 months, I can safely say that I did not regret my decision of choosing fisheries in the end because of how much I learned and experienced.

Conclusion

With all of this out of the way, overall, this summer has been quite a ride. It was not as fun as my time with CCMI or the IDEC program, but I definitely learned a lot more in this position than I did in the positions involving those two. I still intend on going through with my original plans of being involved with wildlife, but this internship does drive a hard bargain on where I could potentially end up down the road. In the end, I think I would regret not trying out fisheries before heading onto wildlife, and my experiences over this summer have proven that.

Before I end this blog post, I would like to acknowledge several people. Thank you to the Fisheries Regional 3 Headquarters for an amazing summer! In particular, I wish to express my gratitude to TJ, my supervisor, for always being friendly and ready to help. I also want to thank the invasive carp crew—Kayla, Brian, Charlie, Billy, and Lily—for making the experience fun and helping me throughout in spite of my inexperience and issues. My IDEC program mentor, Mario, deserves thanks for teaching me so much about fisheries and answering all my serious and unserious questions. I want to express my gratitude as well to Monica for helping me through everything in the IDEC program and making the overall experience as stress-free as possible. Finally, to cap off this lengthy list of acknowledgements, I want to dedicate this final piece to Bobbi, my mentor when I first enrolled at UMN-Twin Cities. Although she would say that everything has been a result of my own effort and tenacity, this road would be a lot more rocky were it not for her help, and for that, I am immensely grateful.

Thank you for taking the time to read about my summer experience with the DNR’s Fisheries Division. It has been a somewhat short, but fun, journey of learning and adventure. I do not know what the future has in store for me just yet (hopefully wildlife-related this time), but I hope it is just as fun and educational as my time with fisheries.

All the best,

Tim