State officials have started a series of surveys to chart the population of fish in lakes and streams around the state.
“The idea is to sample multiple components of the fish population over a period of time throughout the summer to get a really comprehensive perspective,” said Andrew Carlson, an Iowa Department of Natural Resources biologist and the fisheries manager for the Spirit Lake district.
The DNR conducts these surveys in the spring, summer and fall, going to different depths and using three sampling techniques. “Spring electrofishing, summer hoop netting and fall fyke netting, so each of those gears targets different components of the water column and different fish in general,” Carlson said. “Certainly you get some overlap.”
In the spring, crews typically find a lot of blue gills and crappies in shallow water, but hoop netting in the summer goes deeper and they typically find more catfish in Iowa lakes in the summer. Here’s a link to all sorts of data from these fish surveys around the state that anglers can search to evaluate fishing spots. For example, sampling last year at Lake Icaria in southwest Iowa found 11 different species of fish, including largemouth bass and walleye.
