Captain Anthony Mendillo, and was beautifully captured by Shawn Heinrichs.
After all, each popup satellite tag (which is more like a pressure- and water-proof iPhone for marine animals) costs us $4000 USD each! And that doesn’t include the time and effort our team put in to do the field work and analyze the data once the tags “pop off”. Successful PSAT tagging for big fish is nearly always the result of carefully orchestrated hard work by a diverse team of experienced fishermen and taggers, with a tight budget!
To tag, the crew has to catch and hook a sailfish via rod and reel, and then carefully leaders it onto a thick wet padded mat. We cover its eyes to minimize stress and irrigate its gills with a stream of seawater through the mouth. With seawater oxygenating the gills, sailfish recuperate quickly and their colors return right away. We then carefully anchor the tag’s dart in the best spot on its flank. It has to be just right so as not to disturb the fish’s fins or impact its swimming behavior. For future genetics work, we also collect and store a very tiny fin clip sample and remove the circle hook from the fish’s gape. All of these actions are well orchestrated and usually completed within 90 seconds or less. We have one last look at the sailfish’s condition before the crew lifts it carefully over the gunnel and sends it off into the blue!
The big surprise
We were able to keep multiple tags attached on sailfish for up to a full year! As if that wasn’t exciting enough, our sailfish proved wrong traditional ideas about where these fish go. The majority of conventionally tagged sailfish were recaptured in the same regions they had been originally tagged in. Our tagged fish have shown us what they are capable of — going just about everywhere in the Northwest Atlantic if they choose to.
Here is one example: We tagged this first sailfish off the Yucatan, where it hung out for a short while. It then traveled to the center of the Gulf of Mexico before heading west past Cuba and eventually ended up off the Florida and Georgia
January 2017 - Stories from the Sea
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