January 2023 - 14

A LOOK BACK CASE FILES
Fisheries technicians, fish wardens, trappers, park and forest rangers and sportsmen ready gear for an experiment in fish sampling methods on Snake River. (WGFD photo)
Sampling the Snake
In 1954 the Wyoming Game and Fish Department tried several methods to
see what lived at the bottom of this famous river
By Breanna Ball
O
n a windy, October day in 1954
fisheries technicians from the Wyoming
Game and Fish Department
hurried along the banks of the
Snake River to set up for a new experiment.
As they stared at the gray, uninviting river they
asked themselves - could a river as large and
swift as the Snake be sampled?
The experiment, detailed in the December
1954 issue of Wyoming Wildlife, aimed to
answer several questions about the Snake River.
Could a detailed study be made of the Snake
River fish population? Would the electrical
equipment on hand be big enough to turn
up the many suckers, whitefish and trout that
inhabit the pool? How many suckers and trout
were there?
14 | January 2023
This experiment required some serious
manpower and last-minute tinkering. Some
equipment was manufactured in Jackson the
same morning as the experiment. Equipment
was brought in from half a dozen points in
Wyoming and a generator was borrowed
from Colorado.
The generator was loaded into a boat and
two bare wires carrying electrical currents were
stretched parallel across 60 feet of the 125foot
wide pool. Both ends of each wire were
attached to poles. Crewman carrying the poles
moved the wires underwater in an upstream
direction. A pair of fixed wires discharged an
alternating current across shallow water at the
head of the pool. This was done to prevent fish
from escaping upstream. This electrofishing
technique proved effective in smaller streams,
but this was the Snake.
The generator became overloaded. Too
much wire was exposed to too much water,
creating too big a load. No fish turned up and
the generator was turned off.
In a different attempt, the crew tied the
bare wires to a powerful AC generator. This
was effective, except for one thing - the fish
it stunned laid at the bottom of the pools
beyond the reach of the long-handled dip nets.
The next attempt included a drag seine,
which like before consisted of two wires
stretched parallel across the stream. The seine
was effective. The dip-netters were busy as
whitefish popped up to the surface. However,
their main target of trout were not stunned.
A third experiment was attempted and
again yielded the same results. Three hundred
whitefish of all sizes, 50 suckers and only one,
snaky lake trout was stunned and captured

January 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of January 2023

January 2023 - 1
January 2023 - 2
January 2023 - 3
January 2023 - 4
January 2023 - 5
January 2023 - 6
January 2023 - 7
January 2023 - 8
January 2023 - 9
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January 2023 - 14
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January 2023 - 47
January 2023 - 48
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