Monday, July 14, 2003

Today I read part of a book called "Fishing For Buffalo"  celebrating "rough" fish.  It is out of print, but a great read if you can find it.  The author says he has a few copies left to sell if you contact him.  I was sitting there starving while the book described some of the tasty flesh that anglers disparage in favor of "game" fish.  Some of these fish come really huge and plentiful because they swim below the radar of most anglers here in walleye country and so they don't get fished out.  The big secret is that if they come from decent water, they taste just as good if not better than game fish.  Burbot and freshwater drum supposedly taste especially good.  One author, Tom Dickson,  married a classmate of mine from Macalester and used to work at the DNR before he moved to Montana. He was featured in this excellent City Pages article.  The other author is Rob Buffler, my landlord from another lifetime.  I didn't have any interest in fishing when I knew those guys, but after reading their book while hungry, I have the bug, bad.  There were pictures of Tom floating in some tube while fishing.  I didn't know people did that. 8:22:58 PM    comment []

Research biologists want to have a place to enter stomach contents in our fish database. In some cases they want to get really specific as in the exact species of fish found in another fish's stomach. In other cases, they just need to know the general type of food: insect, plant, crustacean, frog, etc. In still other cases, they just record the volume of stomach contents. How to design a database when the data collected is in varying states of decay? I think I will have in the pick list the top 50 or so most common stomach contents and then add a lot of selections like "other" or "insect-other" to the bottom of the list. Then, there can be a comment box for describing the 'other', that black mass of half digested insects they find in a fish belly. 3:46:00 PM    comment []