First Week at US Fish and Wildlife Service

The first week of my NFWF Applied Scholars Program has been a very informative one for sure. This summer I will be interning at the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). The USFWS is a bureau within the Department of the Interior that has been around for over 125 years. The mission of the service is, “working with others to conserve, protect and enhance fish, wildlife and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people.” The service is broken up into multiple different branches in order to be as effective as possible.

The office that I will be working in is the Baton Rouge Fish and Wildlife Conservation office and my mentor is Glenn Constant, who happens to be the project leader in this office. I will also be working closely with Kayla Kimmel. Kayla is a fisheries biologist who specializes in alligator gar research and conservation, telemetry and monitoring, and education and outreach. 

Some of the opportunities I am very excited about is that I get to go into the field with some of the biologists and learn more about sonar mapping and how it works in accords to water. Then I get to watch the data that we collect turn into an actual map through GIS programming. I also get to attend meeting with Glenn regarding different issues and policies regarding the Atchafalaya Basin, the Gulf of Mexico Alliance (GOMA), the Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission, and other agencies.

Something that I learned about in my first week as an intern that I thought was super cool was telemetry. Telemetry is a process in which measurements or data is collected at certain points and transmitted through specific equipment for monitoring. In this specific office, the biologists study different threatened or endangered species, including Acipenser oxyrinchus desotoi, or the Gulf sturgeon. This fish can reach sizes up to nine feet long and 300 pounds. The Gulf sturgeon is an anadromous fish, which means that they grow and increase their condition in the warm, saltwater of the Gulf of Mexico but each spring they migrate to inland rivers anywhere from Louisiana to Florida to spawn. In order to understand this species more, the biologists here have gone into the field to collect these prehistoric fish and tag them. Kayla explained to me that they use gill nets to catch the sturgeon and then they surgically insert an acoustic tag into the fish. This tag allows them to conduct fish survival studies, monitor the fish’s passage/trajectory, and most importantly measure the bypass effectiveness at dams and other passages. Kayla showed me some of the tags and the amount of technology that can fit inside those devices was amazing. Some of them have a battery that can last up to 7 years!

While the first week of this internship hasn’t been very eventful, I have learned so much and I can’t wait to see what the rest of the summer holds!