2026 Fieldwork Updates
By Emily Swick, MSc Student at Trent University
The last year has been busy for field crews from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and Trent University on Stoney Lake! Since this is the first fieldwork update in a while, and definitely the first since I have been on the project, here’s a brief look at what we’ve been up to lately.
Last fall (2025) we winded down the field season with a few tagging days on Stoney. In September, we were out tagging largemouth bass, walleye and musky. These tags are surgically implanted into fish and give us data on fish movement, depth, acceleration and/or body temperature. The tags transmit this data to acoustic receivers placed throughout the lake that “listen” for these transmissions. These receivers detect (“hear”) a fish’s tags when they swim by, and store the data transmitted by that tag. Each tag has a unique code, so we know which fish each transmission comes from. During these few days of tagging, most of these fish were tagged by my supervisors, Graham Raby and Jake Brownscombe, but I also got to help with a few!
Later in the fall when the water temperatures dropped, we were out about a week before the ice started to form to tag lake whitefish. After a few unsuccessful years that yielded only 2 fish tagged, our crew was able to capture and tag 29 whitefish in two nights! These are the only cold-water fish we have tagged in Stoney Lake, different from bass, walleye and musky who like warmer water. We expect to find that the whitefish occupy the deepest parts of the lake, especially in the summer when water temperatures near the surface are too hot for them to survive in. This makes these fish an exciting edition to the project, and we can't wait to study their behaviours.
We started off the 2026 tagging season strong in May with more walleye and smallmouth bass tagging. The tags we use in these fish last about 2 years, and so we are always interested in adding more walleye and bass to the project to give us many years of important data. We also welcomed a new member to the project, Stewart Pim, who is doing him masters at Trent University using the musky tracking data from Stoney Lake.
In July, Kurt Smith (Fisheries and Oceans Canada) led our 4th annual receiver download on Stoney. The acoustic receivers we use store data and need to be retrieved once a year to download the data and for maintenance (new batteries). Fish biologists use a variety of methods for retrieving their receivers, including boat hooks, automatic release receivers (that float to the surface at the push of a button) and even grappling lines. On Stoney, we have a fancy under-water drone that Kurt uses to hook a rope to the receiver anchor so the whole thing can be pulled up (all 85lbs of concrete anchor).
The receivers are suspended just off the bottom and are placed throughout the lake at a range of depths. Downloading the data from all 74 receivers provides the graduate students on the project, Amber, Stewart and I, with millions of data points to wrangle for our specific research questions. 41.6M detections across 74 receiver locations from 353 fish we've tagged (7 species), to be precise - that's where we're at as of our July 2026 download.
This August, we met with members of the Stoney Lake community at Viamede Resort to share some updates on the project. We also provided a glimpse into some of our recent findings about fish behaviour and habitat preferences (more on those will be shared to this blog soon!).
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