mcgyver5: Work

DNR Trout Stream Easement GIS Layer

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 21:23:59 GMT

My cube neighbor is creating a database of all the easements owned by the state along trout streams. It will soon be available in GIS format. That is, you can download the data and make pictures like this, which is the new data layed over arial photos. This particular selection is Lower Gavin Brook in Stockton, MN:

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 23:06:45 GMT

I wanted to remove a range of items from a list using the List.subList method. I tried the following:

	// al is defined previously as ArrayList al = new ArrayList();
        List l = al.subList(20,50);
        al.removeAll(l);

That got me the java.util.ConcurrentModificationException

The documentation says that a subList is dependent on the List that it is sublisting from. So, while a sublist is open, it is manipulating the parent list and seems to have a lock on it. Instead, you can create a brand new ArrayList and fill it with the subList, thus freeing up the sublist so that a future call can modify the original List:

	ArrayList sl = new ArrayList(al.subList(10,40));
    	al.removeAll(sl);

So why does

List = myList.subList(10,30);

get you a different animal than

ArrayList temp = new ArrayList(myList.subList(10,30)); ??

because in the first snippet, I haven't instantiated a new object, I just created a reference to an existing object. In the second snippet, I created a brand new object. That's what the word "new" gets me.

Trapping Turtles

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 04:13:33 GMT

This is a turtle tag. If you are a turtle seller or recreational turtle trapper, all of your traps require one. The DNR sells about 50 turtle licenses each year. Three people here have told me they taste like chicken. If not prepared properly they can be very high in contaminants because their fatty tissues store contaminants from their scavenger diet.

To prepare a snapping turtle, you chop the head off and let it bleed out for 24 hours because the involuntary movements last that long. If you don't hang them up while they are bleeding, they can crawl away without a head and get lost. Turtle is a popular item on the menu of area restaurants west of St. Cloud. I want to find out where I can try some.

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 21:02:37 GMT

Roland just came by the office. He is always interesting to talk to. His work is organizing fishing education events. He is putting together a kids fishing training event outside the Twins game on May 10. The DNR puts on lots of great family events like this. The schedule for all of these is on the DNR events calendar . He also told me about two blogs by friends of his: True Life and David Anderson's Lost City.

Mon, 29 Mar 2004 20:03:37 GMT

IntelliJ IDEA If you use IntelliJ 4.0 to check out projects from CVS make sure you click the "Change keyword substitution" to binary button in the CVS checkout procedure. Failure to do this could cause your project to fail to compile since the jar files will be corrupt.

Static

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 23:55:17 GMT

1 exerting force by reason of weight alone without motion

2 showing little change

An early frustration in learning Java is the error: non-static method foo( ) cannot be referenced from a static context
Perhaps you are trying to call a simple method of your class from the main() method. The main method is a static context. The quick solution is to instatiate your object with MyObject mo = new MyObject right inside your main method. now you have an instance of MyObject
A static variable or method is going to persist across all the objects instantiated.
Static means that you lose the use of the 'this' keyword because the use of 'this' implies that you have an instantiation of an object.
Static means that it doesn't depend on the instantiation of an instance of the object. It still exists and can be called from an instance of the object, but it can also be called without creating the object.
The main() method is static because you have to call it to start a java program. That is, you call it before any objects are instantiated.

Consider the following class:

public class AddMe{
	
	static int num = 100
	
	static int add(int i){
		int sum = i+2;
		return sum;
	}
}

When I want to access the variable num, I can just say, myNum = AddMe.num and get the number 100.
I can also instantiate AddMe am = new AddMe() and then call myNum = am.num with the same effect.
Same with the add method. myNum = AddMe.add(2) sets myNum to 4 and so does myNum = am.add(2)
During my one week java class from Sun, I completed an exercise by using all static methods. I could then call the methods just like I made function calls in PHP or VB. My solution was used as an example of bending Java to act like a procedural language. Which, in case you need to be told, was frowned upon. It avoids all the Object Oriented concepts of Java. You don't even ever need to instantiate a class!

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 04:16:55 GMT

New Minnesota weblog. All about canoe racing. A Radio weblog. He works at the DNR, in fisheries no less.

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 17:20:32 GMT

My Findings on HashMaps:

A Map is one type of Collection in Java. Collections are used to hold a bunch of objects. Different Collections let you look up your objects in different ways.
The special thing about Maps is that the way you look up your objects in a Map is with another object.
A Map is like an associative array in PHP. It is a container for key - value pairs.
To get values out of a Map, you iterate through the Map's keys and use the get() method to get the value associated with that key back out.
Map is the interface, Hashmap or TreeMap is the implementation of that interface, just like ArrayList is an implementation of List. So, to make a new HashMap, you would say Map myHashMap = new HashMap();
A HashMap uses the hashCode() method available to all Java objects to take the hashCode of your object so that it can quickly find it when you want it.
with a HashMap, your objects will not be sorted the way you expect
with a TreeMap, the objects are sorted in a way that makes sense.

JavaScript Disable Links

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 17:52:50 GMT

Here is the javascript function I used to disable the link that people often click more than once:

function disable_links(){

// this function disables all the links on the page

for(var i=0; i < document.links.length;i++)

{

document.links[i].onclick=function () { return false; }

document.links[i].title = "The exam has been submitted. Please wait for results page";

}

return true;

}

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 14:39:39 GMT

For two weeks I had this really frustrating problem:

When users submitted the online fisheries exam, sometimes they would get an error page while the results would be emailed with no problems. I kept testing it and never got the error. I wondered if the database was crapping out because of too many open connections, I wondered about browsers caching error pages.

Then I watched someone submit the exam. They were like, "it sometimes takes several clicks before it submits"..... click click click. It is second nature to me not to submit a form more than once, no matter how long it takes the server to process the form.

So, when testing, click all the buttons more than once, because it's a sure bet your users will.

In any case, there should be some code that handles this problem, but I didn't write the thing, I just inherited it.

ArrayLists

Sat, 13 Mar 2004 12:57:53 GMT

I had the hardest time using an ArrayList. I had an ArrayList full of Fish objects and getting them out with ArrayList.get() and wanting to do some Fish type operations such as printing out data about the Fish and comparing it to another Fish.

To get the third Fish out of the ArrayList it is in, I tried

currentFish = myArrayList.get(2);

The trick is that ArrayLists (and other containers) store all objects as Objects instead of as Fish or Dogs or Cats or Cars or Strings. This behavior happens for all types of java Collections. So when you call an object back out of an ArrayList, you have to cast it back into whatever object it is supposed to be

currentFish = (Fish)myArrayList.get(2);

Further confusion happens because every object has toString() over-ridden and automatically available so that when you think you are getting a string back from an ArrayList and want to print it out, it works fine.

I even had it print out the results of getClass() on the Object I was retrieving from myArrayList and even that told me it was a Fish! But still, it was being treated like an Object until the cast.

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 19:50:36 GMT

Added notes on using IntelliJ IDEA GUI builder.

Review of Poachers Caught!

Fri, 05 Mar 2004 05:02:25 GMT

From Poachers Caught!, a book by a retired Minnesota Conservation Officer:

In mid-March, a crust formed on the melting snow overnight, preventing already weakened animals from getting to food sources only 30 feet from the trail. Deer were slowly starving.

Many rural dogs located these weakened populations and their primitive instincts prevailed. The size and breed of the dog had no bearing on the dog's desire to kill; they were pets transformed into wolves. The morning was the critical time for the killing sprees. The snow, still crusty after a cold night, would support the dogs' weight and allow them to take long romps far from home over the frozen surfaces. A pack of mutts would actually form a hierarchy, the largest and strongest dog assuming leadership.

Just after sunrise, I patrolled the edges of yards known to have "pack dogs" looking intently for fresh canine tracks entering the woods.

The first set of tracks was quite large, ambling ahead of two smaller prints. The thin crust was unable to hold my weight, forcing me to limit my forward stumbling to the deer trails. Within five minutes of my grueling march, I spotted the first sign of mutilation: a yearling deer lay half buried 3 feet off the deep path. It appeared to have hardly struggled while raging teeth had torn it apart. Dogs on a deer mission seldom eat their prey; they only kill for the primal thrill!

Twenty yards farther was another red swirl of devastation. Two more fawns lay a few feet apart amid a layer of brown and white hair strewn about the otherwise white surface.

Before my morning trek was finished, I witnessed 16 carcasses of deer, all slaughtered and left for the ravens and coyotes to complete the feeding cycle.

I appreciate the book. It gives a real education in natural resource enforcement.

I learned:

A good way to poach fish at night without attracting attention is to sink a light into the lake and spear the fish as the come to check out the light.
Don't tell the conservation officer that all the fish you have cut up and packaged are rock bass. He won't believe you.
Poach in an area without vehicle access or surrounded by private lands.
Don't mark the path to your illegal gill netting operation with orange tape
If you use booze to control the alchoholic butcher that processes your poached deer, keep the shack were he lives locked.

There is a great deal of "It was a dark and stormy night" writing here. However, the exciting stories and insight into north woods culture make the "forward stumbling" through the flowery prose worth while.

Pretty much a meat and potato storyteller, he wades into the technical detail of his work without a look back. I find the details interesting. He has a deep knowledge of the biology of the resource he is trying to protect and great skills at watching and dealing with people. I read in the Star Tribune that he published the book himself. He could have used a better editor.

Despite the rough writing, he made his poachers come alive. There are sheepish tourists that know they are breaking the law, drunken, gun toting hard core poachers who physically intimdate the officer. He nails the descriptions of these people and that in itself is entertaining.

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 00:39:06 GMT

To he who wrote the java programs I have to maintain:

I curse your name 10 times daily.
I curse you for having different stuff checked in to version control than is actually in production.
I curse you for inventing your own stupid inscrutable templating system.
I curse you for not leaving any comments in your code.
I curse you for leaving some parts of your application calling a test database and others calling a production database.
I curse you for naming methods f2, f3, f4, f5, f6, f7, f8, f9 etc but also for having a method named fl which in my editor is indistinguishable from f1
I curse you for the critical javascript functions called blah and blah2.
I curse you for leaving me a java class with 3000 lines.
I curse you for naming things ShowBean and MenuBean when they aren't really beans at all.

The invisible hand of the marketplace gives us the finger

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 15:56:00 GMT

We suspect that Frank has pink-eye. Last time we suspected it, we went to the doctor, paid a $12 co-pay for the doctor to tell us that they didn't test for it but just gave out antibiotics (even though it could have been viral pink-eye). I think it was another $12 co-pay for the prescription. This time, instead of paying for a visit, we chose to wait and see if it went away by itself. We had some of the antibiotics left over from last year so we applied that in a haphazard way. In the meantime, we took Frank to all kinds of places where he could have transmitted pink-eye. It seems to have gone away, but it occured to me that these decisions are being made over and over again across the population. If the kid is sick, wait to see if he gets worse. Save $25 bucks or even $150 off of a doctors visit. Who cares if he might infect other people. Other people getting sick doesn't affect our bottom line, so why should it enter into the calculation?

If I get a staph infection, I'm not going to know what it is without a test. If that test is going to cost me $15 (which it will next year when our new contract goes into effect), I am going to wait and see if it goes away by itself. In the meantime, I will go to the YMCA and rub that staph infected leg all over some exercise mats. Then, with the $15 I saved, I will go to see Bad Santa and my leg will itch something fierce, so I will reach down under my sock and scratch. Ahhh. Then I will touch the arm on my chair. And I will visit the bathroom where my leg will touch the toilet seat. Then, two days later, when my leg is bright red and 6 degrees hotter than the rest of my body and there are red streaks going up towards my femoral artery, I will go to the emergency room, where there is also a $15 co-pay, but the visit will cost the medical system closer to $500 instead of the $150 office visit.

The thing we hear about health care in Canada and other places that are afflicted with health care programs that cover everyone at 1/3 of the cost of our system is that they have to wait a long time to get seen. Would this be true for a staph infection? Here, I had to wait a few months to get a colonoscopy, but can get seen the same day for something like pink-eye or a staph infection (not that I had one of those.) I can't imagine that Canada would make someone with an infectious disease wait a long time. Are there still SARS patients waiting to be seen?

Empty shell of grinning evil

Fri, 21 Nov 2003 03:09:32 GMT

The new Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center held an open house today. This is a new complex right across the street from where I work. DNR and MPCA employees were invited on a tour.

We were shown all the various staging areas for booking prisoners. I was reminded of the place where Paulie had been incarcerated last season on the Sopranos. A huge crowded room with a bunch of chairs and a couple of telephones in the middle. There were rooms for lawyers to meet with prisoners, some with Plexiglas separators and some without. There was the 24 hour desk where people will be put in jail and bailed out again for the next 50 years. There was the master control center that had the 40 screens for monitoring the entire jail at once. There was the kitchen area where all food preparation will take place. There were funny towel racks in the cells that are just impossible to hang yourself on. And, finally, there was a court room of the type you see on max-x where somebody goes bananas and 15 burly corrections officers clobber them. I plan on going to a lot of trials as the court is open to the public and I will be right across the street.

The current jail is built into the bluffs of the Mississippi River. If you walk over the Robert Street Bridge, you will run across women standing on the bridge waving or signing to their jailed lovers. It is funny to contrast the vision statement for the old jail, built in the 80s:

"Our goal was to provide a more humane environment with maximum natural light and views for inmates"

With the technical details of the cells I saw today. The narrow cell windows were cleverly covered with white plastic that let a little light in, but did not allow anyone to look out. "No more watching fireworks", as one guard said, "no more watching every celebration on Harriet Island"...just the perquisites that made our prison population balloon exponentially.

There was also a high-tech firing range built by the Minneapolis based Caswell International Corp that featured an air system that replaced the air every 2 minutes so that users would not be exposed to lead particles in the air, Hepa filters to protect the outside environment from the lead. Ever wonder what happens to bullets at the other end of an indoor firing range? In this one, the bullets go through a self-sealing rubber tarp and bury themselves in a massive pile of rubber chunks, then, every few months, a special vacuum cleaner sucks up all the rubber chunks, leaving the bullets to be handled as hazardous waste.

They showed us the family visitation area, where instead of talking to prisoners through a sheet of Plexiglas, family members sit down and look at their loved ones through a video screen. There was a children's play area in there that handily beat out Betsy's Back Porch coffee for the most depressing children's play area ever.

DNR Land Trust

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 18:44:19 GMT

Theresa of DNR Lands and Minerals gave a great presentation this morning at our speaking club about Land Trust Funds, a little DNR program with a lot of history behind it and a fair amount of present day controversy.

Land Trust Funds have roots back to English law. A certain portion of land is set aside to pay for the schools in the area. In the early days of our country the same practice was instituted. Schools were partially paid for by revenue generated by land set aside for that purpose.

For Minnesota and most other western states, they instituted a grid system uniformly across the land. Each county is made up of townships. Each township has 36 1 square mile sections. Each section is made up of 16 "40s", which was a 40 acre plot of land. and a before the advent of 40 oz bottles of beer, a 40 was known as a unit of land. "My back 40". "40 acres and a mule", etc.

The Homestead Act of 1862, the same law that created the land grant universities, gave sections 16 and 32 of each township to the states to be used to generate revenue for education. This revenue was generated by leasing the land to a farmer, harvesting trees, mining.

A lot of schools were built on these sections. Even today, if you are wandering around in rural MN or Iowa or Dakota and you find yourself at an old one room school house, chances are you are at section 32 or 16 of the township. In Minnesota, all the good farm land was gradually sold off and the money from the sales went to the state fund for schools. Farmers were hungry for land and political pressure built to sell off these lands.

Today in northern MN, there are still a lot of state trust fund lands generating a little bit of income for the schools. 7 tenths of 1 percent of the state school budget comes from these sources. These are being slowly sold off in auctions.

One political complication is that some of these trust fund lands are located in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and so are federally controlled. There is a fight to see if the state can arrange a land swap with the feds to make up for the fact that some state owned land deliberately set aside to raise revenue for the schools cannot be touched.

Crippled by paranoia.

Wed, 05 Nov 2003 15:58:04 GMT

I work in one department outside of the central information services bureau. They recently offloaded some applications to us, for me to maintain. They are all java web applications in various states of disrepair that reflect the learning curve of a now departed java developer.

These applications are subject to mysterious problems where they are working one day and broken the next day. For example, one of them silently switched to inserting data into a test database after happily populating a production database for months.

I know this is bullshit, but a voice is telling me that someone is doing it on purpose. A secret war to prove that development of applications should only be done in MIS? The acts of a disgruntled former employee? An outside hacker that has access to our servers but delights only in making insignificant changes that only affect me?

Paranoia is the height of self-centeredness. The belief that people are even thinking about you let alone working hard to sabotage you.

I give voice to this here even though there is probably a reasonable explanation. But boy, it makes me tense.

They had to cancel some exams today because I couldn't get the web application that administers exams working.

Software Requirements Part I

Tue, 04 Nov 2003 13:31:43 GMT

The DNR Project Requirements Group meets for the first time today. The assigment for the first meeting was to read part one of "Software Requirements" by Karl Weigers, a requirements guru. Published by Microsoft Press.

The metrics should give pause to any developer. The costs of not doing requirements well are staggering. On average, rework consumes 30 - 50 percent of total costs and requirement errors account for 70 to 85 percent of reasons for rework
The first chapter gives the top reasons for requirements errors. The one that jumped out at me was "CREEP"
The author suggests using testing to constantly verify requirements. This can be verbal. You have a meeting with the customer and walk through what the software will do. It can also involve a rigorous verification process where a team of people look at your requirements documents and try to find errors.
After reading this, I know I want to create a project glossary so we can have a reference for all the crazy terms fisheries biologists throw around.
Establish a baseline document that the customer agrees to. This document serves to connect cost estimates, time estimates, requirements, basis for acceptance of completed project and a jumping off point for change management. The first thing to strive towards is a baseline for each of the following documents:
1. Vision and Scope statement "why are we building this?"
2. Use Case Document "Customers can make reservations"
3. Software Requirements Specification "The system shall send the customer an email verification of the reservation"
The book suggests creating user interface and technical prototypes, even a preliminary implementation. This seems to fly in the face of all the cautions in the book, "dont start coding until requirements are done" I question this.
Version control on the requirements documents. Book suggests using a requirements management tool. Our analyst has a home grown one that he has developed over his career and it seems effective.
hold facilitated elicitation workshops. **Shudder** We have tried several of these. Without the other stuff in place, they didn't bring us to where we needed to be. We didn't create usable requirements documents out of them and to do it again now may bring accusations that we are going over the same ground again.
Don't use sign off as a weapon. Sign off means the customer has agreed to your estimates and requirements. I guess this means don't wave the requirements in your customer's face and scream, "You already bought it, sucker!!!" Use it instead as a basis for change management
This section of the book leaves me wondering how estimates of time and money are connected to requirements. It says "Developers are in the best position to estimate costs" and then the next sentence says "many developers are not skilled estimators" so, how do we do it?
The book has a nice "bill of rights for software customers" followed by a "bill of responsibilities for software customers" "Make timely decisions" is one of these...
Finally, it has a list of good requirements characteristics. "Avoid lumping requirements into long narrative paragraphs. " bullets, bullets bullets.

A warning to ye...

Tue, 28 Oct 2003 16:47:51 GMT

I can't impress upon ye enough: set error_handling to E_ALL (verbose) when developing PHP. You will cut your errors in half. You can do this in three ways:

uncomment the following line in your php.ini file: error_reporting = E_ALL . This will affect all PHP scripts
add the line error_reporting = 2047 in an .htaccess file. This will affect only php files in or below the directory of the .htaccess file.
add a line of code at the start of every php page: error_reporting (E_ALL); This will affect only the files that you alter.

After you do this you may get a whole page of warnings about undeclared variables. This is a good thing, since it forces you to declare all variables and lets you know when you introduce new ones into the mix by mistake. You will at some point mis-type variable names. Without error reporting turned verbose, PHP accepts these mistakes as real variables:

$species_code = "WAE";

if($speces_code == "WAE"){ //do stuff}

The above code exhibits a bad feature of PHP; that you don't need to declare variables before using them. I introduced a variable called speces_code to the PHP script and since it is blank it is not equal to "WAE". It just skipped over this comparison without a blink!

Also, set error reporting to zero when in production so that visitors cannot peer into the inner workings of your code and directory structure when they encounter an error.

Strike Vote

Tue, 30 Sep 2003 21:59:14 GMT

There are about 10000 MAPE employees in the State of Minnesota
75% of all the MAPE employees are eligible to vote, meaning that they have paid the extra money to be real members. : 7500 people
75% of the eligible members voted : 5625 People
66% of the members who voted where against the contract: 3712
So, a little more than a third of us voted us into this situation.

Doomed

Tue, 30 Sep 2003 02:28:20 GMT

My fellow union members turned down the contract the state offered us. I feel that the union is dying to have a strike because they think strikes are cool. They see themselves as waging an historic battle. While they live their fairytale, I get to choose between crossing the picket line and facing the scorn of my co-workers or sitting at home and losing more money that I could ever hope to regain through an improved contract.

I predict that the strike will last until the state offers to exchange the step increase, which only benefits workers who are not yet at the top of their pay scale, for a cost of living increase, which benefits everyone. That is what happened with the last strike.

A few points on political reality:

A great number of Minnesotans are without health care or paying a lot more for it. This doesn't mean we should lose our excellent benefits, but it gives a chance for our critics to practice divide and conquer tactics: They can say, "look, you have shit for health care and those state workers have a pretty good deal. Help us take it away from them so that you all have shit for health care.

The Pawlenty administration has been doing OK. I prefer that they raise taxes on the rich. I prefer that they end the ethanol subsidy. But, on the plus side, he is looking at importing drugs from Canada.

There is a tiny portion of the state budget that is legally or politically "touchable" State workers are a great political target. There is a juggernaut of political will to cut the budget and a complete lack of political will to go after the real budget buster: health care. So, to strike in the face of this juggernaut is like throwing ourselves in front of a speeding bus.

I am ready to pay more for the great health care coverage my family and I get. The state has a budget crisis and everyone has to sacrifice. The reality is that health care costs are breaking our budgets! If we don't pay for them up front, our children will pay for them down the road.

Let me end by saying that if I have to sacrifice in this way, lets be damn sure that the contractors who make so much money off the state sacrifice too. That means drug companies, construction companies, computer companies and such, all the way down to the folks who sell us office chairs.

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 13:01:43 GMT

Here is What I Learned at the DNR Large Lake Conference

Mille Lacs:

Walleye season effectively ends there in mid-july because the perch that they feed on become big enough to eat around then and they are focused on eating perch and not on your lousy fake lures.

Tullibee populations have taken a huge dip lately. Tullibee are not regarded as prime fishing targets, even though everyone attests to how tasty they are. This is important because tullibee are prime forage species for walleye. Because they are not "valued" as much as other species, you have been allowed, until now, to fish for tullibee with nets. The Asian community liked to come to Mille Lacs and bring home trailers full of tullibee. In response to the tullibee decline, you can no longer fish with nets (sport netting), there is a bag limit of 10 fish, and they stopped aggresively stocking Muskies because muskies hammer on the tullibees. I guess these new regulations mean the tullibee has graduated from junk fish to valued managed fish.

Lake of the woods:

Lake of the woods is split by the pre-cambrian shield as well as the border with Canada. The canadian side has tons of islands that are the remnants of ancient mountains and US side is scraped clean of all that and is flat and open.

Suprisingly, ice fishing has made up more of the angling pressure on this lake than summer fishing. This is because of the warm winters in which Lake of the Woods was about the only place to go for ice fishing.

When we were out on Lake of the Woods, our guide pointed out islands that had shrunk because of rising water levels. One long skinny island (map) had rows of dead pine trees lying by the water.

Pepin:

Why is Pepin even considered a lake? Because of water retention. Water that flows into Pepin stays there a while. There are high algae and zooplankton levels that you wouldn't find in a river. Biologically, it looks like a lake. However, there is not a seasonal water turnover as cold surface water sinks and warmer bottom water rises.

How is Pepin different from a regular lake? One big difference is that walleye spawning habitat is created by flooding land vegetation instead of using clean gravel substrates. If it is a dry year and water levels are low during spawning season, "recruitment" suffers (recruitment is the number of individuals that make it into the fish population in a given year). In high water, they swim past the submerged park benches and picnic tables and lay their eggs in submerged vegetation like reed canary grass. In 1999, fisheries biologists set out to prove this was the primary spawning method on Pepin and tracked 20 walleyes to see that they did, in fact, all spawn on reed canary grass. They published their study in Investigational Report No. 481 . The question comes up about how the fish learned to do this. It is not a localized adaptation; the Lake Pepin walleyes are 'mutts' and get genes from up river mixed in all the time. It could also be that young spawners follow older fish to the spawning areas when the time comes.

Invasive species. The biggest threat lately seems to be carp (black, asian, silver). The aquaculture industry and their friends in congress down in the grit eatin' part of the world resisted attempts to ban these critters because they are helpful in eating pond scum in rearing enclosures. In spite of promises, they escaped from the ponds and now migrate further north each season. These carp are planktivorous and eat all the food that tiny walleyes and other native species would eat. Some of these carp also leap out of the water at the sound of an approaching motor and have caused injuries and deaths to boaters. Fish biologists in Missouri are required to wear motorcycle helmets when working on a boat. Note to jet skiiers: being struck simple by a 20 pound flying carp doesn't give you an excuse to blame the conservationists for this one. Your friends in the aquaculture industry pushed this one through. You can thank them when you get knocked off your $5000 jet ski.

Exotic Daphnia found in lower pools in 2002.

Zebra mussels, a nasty invasive species that cement themselves in large numbers to substrates, intake pipes, and even slow moving animals ( ;-D ), have threatened Pepin and other waters. In 2001, Lake Pepin trawling samples had to be cancled because massive numbers of zebra mussles made the nets too heavy to lift. Zebra mussles experienced a huge die off lately. (There were mounds of mussle shells on the shore of Pepin last year and only three muscles were found in the nets). This looks really positive because there was a huge die off in Illinios and the mussels have not yet come back. No one knows why. It could be warmer water. It could be sediment.

Vermillion

Rusty Crayfish are still a big problem on Vermillion. Rusty crayfish mow down aquatic vegetation and outcompete less aggressive crayfish that fish like to eat. When they do surveys, they find that their nets are full of crayfish that have skeletonized the fish they are trying to weigh and measure. There is talk of using a formula to calculate the actual poundage of the catch from the weight of the crayfish found in the net.

The two basins of Vermillion are quite different. The east basin is more productive

Concern over Bass tournament:

Hundreds of boats over several days can impact the fishery. This upsets resort owners who see the tournaments driving away regular customers.
Fish caught from all over the lake are all released in the same place.

Red

Upper and Lower Red lakes are at the center of what was once the glacial lake Agassiz. In the area around them, you can see sand berms that once formed the shores of Lake Agassiz. The lower red lake is 100% inside the Red Lake Indian Reservation and Upper Red Lake is about 3/4 reservation lands. The walleye population crashed in the early 1990s due to overfishing. Commercial netting and sport fishing for walleye has been banned on Upper Red Lake since 1999. The DNR is stocking fry into the lake with a goal of restoring the spawning population. The survey numbers are going up slowly. As one fish biologist put it, if you wanted to design perfect walleye habitat, you would make a lake just like Red Lake. It is shallow and windswept with a long fetch (distance of unbroken open water). That means that the wind can clean off the gravel substrate. Clean gravel is important for walleye spawning because the eggs fall down into spaces between the gravel and are thus protected from predators. If the gravel wasn't clean, then biological activity in the spring could starve the eggs of oxygen.

Superior

Lamprey is an invading species that has declined due to lamprey control efforts (i.e. poison). Historic lamprey wound rates on lake trout was about 40%, meaning that 40% of fish had marks that showed they were attacked by lampreys. That is now down to 5%.

Stocked fish do not have the survival rate that wild fish do. Stocking has been ceased in one huge area of Lake Superior and continues at a slower rate in the two other regions of the lake managed by Minnesota. 80% of lake trout are there due to natural reproduction as opposed to stocking.

Thu, 01 May 2003 20:18:45 GMT

Fishing and natural resources event:

On 8 May from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM in Room 302 Kaufert Hall at the University of Minnesota, Bruce Vondracek will be giving a presentation on SE Minnesota land use and relationships to fish populations.

Tue, 22 Apr 2003 14:57:17 GMT

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