Virginia Tech students wade into Toms Creek to put lessons into practice

Connor Hamburger. I'm in Fisheries Techniques and we're at Tom's Creek right now. So we're taking electrofishing gear and seine netting gear and we're going into the creek in riffles and pools and we're capturing all the fish that we can and then we bring them back over the tables behind me here and we use scales and measuring boards to collect data on the fish to analyze their their biomass in the creek. It's really good experience for learning how to collect data and collect samples in the field and that's very good for experience later. It's very useful when I'm working later with data it helps me be able to know how to analyze it and really structure that and collect in a safe and effective way. We're starting with sane netting which is two people dragging a net along and basically capturing a school of fish, hopefully. So one person usually will anchor somewhere, and the other person will sweep in a direction, and we try to be strategic about where we're sweeping, so closer to the shoreline where it may be a little more shallow and easier to scoop them up. You'll sometimes have some person, if it's a rocky bottom, stand behind and lift up because that helps it not get stuck and fish won't escape. We were also going under a lot of cover because you know they'll like to hide there so you have to be strategic about it but one person will come around and you kind of meet and you're just scooping. We caught a lot of telescope shiners which was kind of surprising. I didn't expect to catch as many as we did but we did catch a couple smallmouths as well which is exciting and rock bass but they're all pretty small right now but it's exciting to have variation of species. This is actually like exactly what the biologists do is what we're doing today. You sample and take measurements and see how many fishes there. So this class is like giving me the skills and teaching me literally exactly what my day-to-day will be like, which I think is pretty cool.