Fishing For Science on the Healthy Grin

We are helping with white marlin research projects being done at Dr. John Grave’s lab at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. One project involves pop-up satellite tags that Dr. Graves received at the end of August. There is a little urgency in that Dr. Graves would really like the tags deployed this season. So we fished an overnighter yesterday to try and get tags deployed while the fish are still here. The marlin are caught, brought into the boat, fin clip taken (for a molecular genetics study), fish tagged, revived and released. While trolling for marlin, we put out a small spoon to try for young of the year bluefin tuna for yet other studies. We did not catch any bluefin. The spoon caught blackfin, skipjack, and frigate tuna. We put them to use as bait during the night, catching a swordfish and some impressive sharks. During the daytime, marlin fishing was good. We caught 8 white marlin. We got a DNA sample from each and released each with a satellite tag. The swordfish was large enough to keep but we released it. In addition to the science we were trying to do, the grad student collected remoras for more research and took a silvery fish that we could not ID back to VIMS.