Rebecca M. Krogman

My passion is freshwater fisheries research and has been since the day I was "converted" from studying Wildlife Biology at Iowa State University: the day my fisheries friends took me electrofishing.

It was a beautiful fall day when I found myself shin-deep in a murky Iowa creek (pronounced "crick") with a car battery and an expensive computer on my back. We were going to backpack electrofish this creek, but I thought we wouldn't see anything. After all, twelve inches of muddy water isn't enough to hide anything interesting, is it?! They turned the backpack electrofisher on.

The fish came rolling up.

When electricity hits a fish, it is temporarily immobilized, enabling us to capture it in a net and move it to a livewell for recovery. Then we can identify it, measure it, weigh it, even tag it, before releasing the fish safely into the water. The fish I saw that day were more colorful than most aquarium fish, abundant beyond belief, and ranged in size and diversity from the tiniest madtom to the biggest largemouth. Freshwater habitats are home to more biodiversity per area than the ocean!

I was convinced. Freshwater is where it's at. There is an entire world underwater, a world we can't see, a world that's difficult to measure and difficult to comprehend. The challenge of fisheries research is delving into that world with a net and pulling up useful information.

March 2016