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So we've been trying to do some continuous outreach outreach like every 3 to 4 months, just to let people know what we're seeing.

You know, we don't want any of this information to be secret.

We're trying to be as transparent and open, open with people as possible.

And so we've we've have I think it was 238 data points is what we collected in the past year.

And kind of looking at some, some large scale movements, and we could definitely tell I guess we'll get into some of the results.

Yeah.

No, that's why I kind of let's, let's, let's, let's talk results.

And I think before I want to sort of frame this with, as an angler myself and as somebody who has interviewed and talked to a lot of anglers over the years, we eat this stuff up.

I mean, there's something about telemetry research and being able to see where fish move and try and figure out why they move from point A to point B to point C, and what happens when they're caught in a tournament and then, release back at the way inside as opposed, you know, which might be miles from, from where they were caught.

And I know you've done some additional later phases, this spring, as a matter of fact, taking tournament caught fish working with with tournament organizers to actually take some of those fish and do the surgeries and, and and see if any of them have tags from from the from last year.

So yeah, let's move into that Katie.

Like what what are you know, what what are you seeing.

I mean, tell us some cool stuff.

So I the way in my mind I break it apart kind of per study site.

And so I start over with okay.

And we tag most of those fish out around Piney Island.

And so what really surprised me is those fish really didn't move around a lot.

When that when that drawdown hit in the summer, water temperatures were around 93°F.

Water where we could get a boat was like a foot and a half deep.

And those fish just hung out and in that water and just stayed strong.

There was a couple that really got out of there, and I honestly don't know where they went.

There was probably those were three.

Those were six of the ones that you.

Yeah.

No, they did come back though.

It was what was interesting.

Once water came back up they came right back to it but just don't know exactly where.

They don't know where they went.

After that.

We tracked all in those flats and, and Cotton shed and Saratoga and Pear Loma and just didn't pick up anybody.

So I don't know where on earth those fish went, but we could not detect them for those, some for that summer drawdown.

And we could say the same about state park for the most part, most of the fish in that in the little cove and state park, they just hung out there, bounced around super shallow again, really warm water temperatures, not something that we would necessarily expect.

We thought maybe they would get.

They would find more thermal refuge and a more comfortable water temperature, perhaps.

Is that kind of what the hypothesis was like?

They're going to go someplace else when they get super hot.

Yeah.

And they didn't.

And yeah, I think I was one of them didn't.

Yeah.

I was able to consistently detect seven out of the ten in State park.

And there were a couple that did go out and all the way, we actually picked one up on our first full lake track that had moved from state park and was all the way out in the river channel by Yarborough.

Okay, what kind of distance are we talking about?

We're talking two plus miles.

Okay.

And what was really cool is I went back, it was like January, February this year, and that fish was back in the state park Cove.

So it had gone from state park to Yarborough and somehow made it back to state park.

Now, I don't know, I we've heard from some anglers that they will go release their fish elsewhere instead of like at Yarborough.

So I don't know if that was a if it was true fish hitched a ride with somebody or if they got moved by somebody, but that was really cool.

And then we get to Yarborough and those fish.

That was the most challenging sight to track.

Actually, out of all five of those fish just flat out gone.

Everybody was gone except for two, two stuck around and kind of hung out by that, that water intake where the dam tower, water intake, but everybody else left.

And so where on earth did they go?

We had a couple that moved up through the Jacks Hill flat, and then we picked up some, kind of north.

Right.

Right north of the Yarborough ramp is what they call Yarborough Lake.

And so they moved kind of that direction and went up the little river.

The furthest fish that I detected of Yarborough was actually in a backwater close to horseshoe, which is one of our other study sites.

I was actually running the river trying to find fish and pick this fish up.

And that was about 2.86 miles as the crow flies from the Yarborough ramp.

Okay, so those those fish at Yarborough are really getting out of there pretty quick.

No.

What about the two sites that were farther, what happened there?

So.

So, horseshoe.

Most of the fish kind of stayed put, when they drew it down.

Of course, that affected the Oxbow, too.

And so those fish would stay out in shallow flats for the most part.

But as soon as that water dropped on those river fish, they actually dropped into the old river channel and the oxbow lake and stuck around 7 to 8ft.

So they were it looked like they were actually kind of seeking that thermal refuge.

Okay.

And we could say the same about McGuire.

We actually had some in McGuire that moved out of the Oxbow portion and went out into the actual main river and sat in like 17 to 18ft of water, sitting on just trees that were hanging out right around the side.

Wow.

That is so.

It sounds like the those fish where where it's more riverine up, you know, they, they obviously they kind of I would guess I don't know, they kind of had to move.

Right.

I because they have to draw down like so.

So they're going why did the Yarborough fish all skedaddle from, from that, that area.

But the other one seemed to like kind of stay in the same place.

I mean and no and I'm, I'm asking you for conjecture and speculation here.

And I know biologists hate that but like, you know, what are you, what are y'all thinking.

I mean like, what are you what's going through your mind as you're trying to hypothesize like, well, what why did these fish do this and these fish did this?

We're we're hoping to really disentangle that with a lot of our data.

So like I was saying, we take temperature, we're taking take level data, we are taking flow data.

And we were trying to capture all the data every time we were out tracking, tracking so that we can try and help explain why fish are, you know, doing these certain things.

Gotcha.

The cool thing about the Yarborough fish that I got to disentangle, we got our genetics results back.

So when we did these surgeries, we did take a fin clip off of them for genetics to see if there is some sort of genetic component to these movements.

Okay.

Because we do stock, Florida bass in Millwood to help contribute to the trophy potential of the bass fishery.

Sure.

What was really cool is the two fish that stuck around Yarborough came back as two pure Florida's, like, 99% Florida genes.

Oh, wow.

So that's what they considered Florida.

And with and looking at the literature and talking with our black bass biologists, it seems like the Florida strain really tend to be more homebodies.

And so this fit actually into that narrative almost perfectly to where those fish didn't move around hardly at all.

They just stayed put.

And those were the two tagged fish that came back as pure Florida's.

So the the ones that were like pure Florida's stayed put.

And then the other ones in that area bailed out of there.

Correct.

That's interesting.

So so that was a really unique observation.

When getting that genetic data back from what you talked about, some, you know, absolutes of like movement, like two to almost three miles, were those some of the longest movements that you picked up that, that we were able to find?

Yeah, yeah.

What, what Katy, are the management implications of this work, realizing that there's there's still more all those data points about, you know, dissolved oxygen and water temperature and vegetative cover and woody cover and all these other variables that you are noting when we find these fish.

And I'm guessing we haven't gotten that far down the road yet to like to unpack all of that.

It sounds like, but like, what are I mean, what is what does this mean to an angler?

What does it mean to us as managers of the resource.

So I think as, as managers, you know timing our sampling is optimal for us to be able to get a good picture of what's actually in the lake, you know, catching those larger fish are good.

But in a way if you, if you only have 1 or 2 large fish, you know, those kind of tend to be outliers.

And so we're not sure if those were just anomalies or what we want to be able to get a better picture of everything that's there.

And so if we're timing it up with water temperature.

So that's what I mean by timing is looking at water temperature, seeing if that affects are they move and shallow or are they going out.

So so basically it sounds like this is like going to tell us like okay, the the best window to do our electric fishing in the spring to get a the most accurate population sample that we can.

This is going to tell us like okay, we know that these fish are going to be here like in these water temperatures typically.

Is that kind of what it should help give us some more data driven, management decisions.

Yeah.

And then another big one, of course, is habitat.

You know, all these reservoirs that were constructed in the 19 6070s, 80s are all starting to fill in, and, and fall victim to what we call reservoir aging.

And so trying to figure out with this reservoir aging, of course, there's loss of fish habitat and a in a correlated decline in fishing quality.

And so really trying to dive into what are some of our key habitat areas, what can we do as managers to help help improve weather?

That's leave it the heck alone or to work with, I mean, down south, we have really good working relationships with our core staff.

And so really working with the core to maybe even optimize some some river flow regimes, all the way up to actually doing some, some habitat work on Millwood.

You know, we do all these large scale habitat projects and like Beaver and Norfork, which are awesome, we get a lot of work done in lakes that, quite honestly, are not the most fertile to start with because of where they are.

So they need all they need is they need another shot in the arm.

Right?

Yeah.

And so we, Dylan and I, of course, my supervisor were the two biologists down there.

We would love to get everybody down to Millwood from the state, to, to work on.

Some have maybe a big, big habitat project down there.

And then this will kind of tell you like where I guess, like maybe if fish aren't using an area that's going to tell you, like we need to bolster the habitat there, they allow us to focus our efforts in the areas where it's needed the most.

You were telling me before we came on there's a couple just kind of some cool stories that always emerge from this type of telemetry.

Were sure share some of that with our listeners.

Yeah I've, I've got two that I really wanted to make sure I talked about.

So one we, I had an angler contact me.

He was out fishing okay.

Out by Piney Island and he was throwing a top water frog and he had a hook on and it broke him off his.

Okay, well, what do you do?

You real back, and you tie on another top water frog and you keep fishing.

And he just went up the bank a little bit more.

And he had caught that fish.

He had actually caught the fish that broke him off the first cast, because the only way he knew that was because that top water was still stuck in his throat.

Wow.

And this just so happened to be one of my tagged fish.

So he did.

He did he know that or did?

Well, he he knew it was a tagged fish because we had marked the fish with that pink tag on the top.

Excellent point.

I'm glad you brought that up.

If you're fishing, if you're fishing, Millwood, you will know because it has an external tag like we call them spaghetti tags or whatever that come out from just behind the door.

So we're just to the side of the dorsal.

Yep.

It's a it's a bright pink tag.

And so it has my phone number and it has that it's attract fish.

It's not an exploitation tag which we also do a game and fish where you get rewarded for harvesting that food.

Right.

In this case, we would really love for you to put the fish back where you caught it, so we can keep tracking it and get some movement data.

But he was out, okay.

And he called me when he got a cell phone signal, said, hey, I'm parked at White Cliffs.

Can you come meet me and get this fish?

Well, by the time he was going back to his truck, it had been that fish had probably been sitting in his live well for a couple of hours.

So I met him at White Cliffs.

We looked at it and I decided, you know, let's let's keep this fish swimming and see what happens, that we couldn't get that frog out of its throat.

So we did release it at the at the White Cliffs ramp, and we picked it up for like another 2 or 3 tracking events, and it had moved up river, from the ramp and actually was caught by another angler in a shallow backwater, just up probably half a mile from where we released it.

And that angler, I think was confused with that tag on the top and thought it was exploitation tag.

And so he brought it home and it had been, it had been sitting at his house for almost the entire day.

And at that point I decided we it wouldn't survive a trip all the way back out to Millwood to try and release it.

And so we got a lot of really interesting data that fish had put on, like, you know, a couple inches of in length and an a little bit of weight since we had tagged it.

So that was really cool to at least get to track it.

Yeah.

And then our other fish.

So we tracked these phase one fish.

Our last tracking event was April because the batteries have now expired because we're these little April of 2025 after marking them in March of 2024.

Yeah.

Okay.

So these little tag battery, the watch batteries had expired.

And so Dillon decided let's bring the electric fishing boat after we track and let's see how true our locations are.

So okay, so we went and tracked to the state park study site.

We got done tracking.

We hopped in the electric fishing boat and went to one of the sites that we had detected the fish, and sure enough, we were able to shake up a fish that we had tracked right to that spot and we could see the spaghetti tag had actually, it was just a piece of plastic hanging out of the fish.

Oh, so like the actual like that, that coating had like integrated.

Oh, wow.

Whether that's from I don't think it was the water quality.

I think it was just sitting in that giant cut grass for a year.

And just that rubbing and wave action just completely wore that tag off.

But it had the scar on its belly.

It healed up great.

And we even took, you know, of course, the receiver and checked it.

And sure enough, that was the fish.

So that was really cool.

Success story.

I was yeah, you know, a little fearful, like, oh no, I've been tracking these fish for a year, all my locations, you know, how accurate are they?

And that really helped confirm that.

Like a validation for what?

What what all you've been doing out there finding truly needles and haystacks.

Yes.

Which we probably should have done a lot earlier on.

But, you know, I feel a lot better about it and really excited to, to get the rest of this information processed and, and share it.

And I guess that's really one of my last questions, Katie.

Like, where where do we go from here?

What's what's next?

I'm I know you've still got some fish marked out there that you've, again, that, tournament organizers and tournament organizations helped, helped with, you go show up at the weigh ins.

A lot easier to catch them that way for you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is.

Yeah.

So where do we go from here?

So we've pretty much wrapped up tracking our phase one fish, which is this first year fish.

And so now we need to do a lot of the data analysis on that, a lot of the fine tune really diving into the stats with which, of course, once we get those results will be sharing.

Everywhere has yet to come back on the podcast.

We'll talk about that when we get some of that stuff too.

And then like you had mentioned, we tagged what we're calling phase two, which is our tournament caught fish phase.

We went it was April 12th and 13th.

We did essentially the same thing, except we were relying on tournaments, to catch fish and we hoping to kind of catch some bigger fish and see where a lot of these bigger fish in these tournament caught fish, are going and where they're moving to.

And so anglers would bring in these fish to weigh in.

We'd be set up with our, our what we did a live release trailer to hold fish and to make sure because obviously they're stressed out from.

Right?

Yeah.

I've been in a boat in a live well for 6 or 7 hours.

Stress was a big component to to what we wanted to do, make sure the fish was healthy.

And we did essentially the same thing, except we have, you know, the different trackers, completed surgeries on site there, let them recover.

Held them for a couple minutes and then released them right back at the ramp to, to emulate kind of what normally occurs in tournaments.

Yeah.

What would happen in a tournament.

Yeah.

And so I've been out there listening for any of those.

Yeah.

I just, I just listened for some.

Yesterday was, was my first outing.

Okay.

The second batch of fish.

So we tagged an additional 50 fish from tournaments.

Okay.

And so yeah, we went out I went out track those yesterday and there's still quite a few that are hanging around.

But we did have some anglers.

I'm super appreciative for our anglers that do catch fish and are calling me.

Let me know what's happening.

From those two tournament or those three tournament caught fish.

There were a couple that were caught already out in Jax Isle, which is like roughly half a mile away from the ramp.

And then another fish was actually caught up right off the river, where Snake Creek comes in.

And that was about a mile and a half from the boat ramp.

Okay.

Within a week, all of those movements are happening within a week of when they were.

So some of them, you said, are still hanging out pretty close to where they were released.

But then some of them are are really just really moving.

And again, I mean, it's just, you know, and I think if, if, if you were either one could figure out why that is, we'd be very rich because we would have, information to sell to every tournament angler, and bass fisherman in the country is like, why they do what they do?

But that's again, that's why.

That's why folks like you, that's why we have you here at Arkansas Game and Fish to try to figure this stuff out.

You know, we're hoping to learn, it's fascinating stuff, Katie.

And, so one question.

The same lifespan about a year on these batteries for, for or not as good on these.

You know, this face.

These face.

Two fish.

How long we've been able to track them?

The battery life on these bigger tags is 800 plus days.

Oh, okay.

I'll be out here.

So what we've been doing last year and what we're going to continue to do is we're tracking monthly.

Okay.

And so I'll be tracking monthly for at least the next two years okay.

These tournament she got a little bit longer battery life on these other bigger bigger device.

Bigger bigger battery life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well very cool.

Any anything else that you want to add to kind of wrap things up?

I mean, like, again, will be all the, all these results, will will be made public.

Well, I'm sure we'll write something about it in our Arkansas Wildlife newsletter.

We may talk about it here again on the podcast.

We got videos to, to, to produce.

It is really fascinating and fun stuff.

And I think again, anglers, as an angler myself, I eat this stuff off.

It's just cool.

No, I, I just really appreciate everybody that's helped contribute to this project, our administration, for getting behind us and supporting it.

You guys coming out and helping us tell the story.

We really just want to get the word out and share this information with everybody.

That's that's why we're collecting it and wanting to learn more about these lakes.

So really just appreciate everybody who's I don't want your phone or your email to blow up big.

Why are you so if like it seriously though, there's a regular Millwood bass saying or that wants to dive a little deeper, maybe ask some questions.

I mean, can they find you on a website or through fisheries?

Or what's the best way to go about that?

Usually.

So at each of the boat ramps, we did post signage that has a phone number, that they can call and they can get with us.

I mean, we, we really appreciate the anglers.

They're a big part of this.

Yeah.

And and so they can reach out any way those, those phone numbers are there or they can get they can get me through the, the network of AGF see numbers.

Sure.

Or contacting headquarters, they always funnel calls down to us in the field offices.

Our staff are really great about that.

It's really cool.

I mean, I mean, and ultimately, you know, for those folks listening, you know, we're here to manage the resources, but we're also here for the people who use those resources.

And, in bass are the most popular fish in Arkansas, largemouth bass.

So, so I know there's a lot of folks that will find this very interesting.

I know I do, Katie, thank you so much for, for everything you do out there and for taking some time to talk to us about this really cool project today.

Of course.

Thanks for having me with.

That is all we've got for this episode of the Arkansas Wildlife Podcast.

Really appreciate y'all tuning in and I hope you'll join us next time.

So long everybody.