American Fisheries Society Training Course: Planning and Executing Successful Rotenone and Antimycin Projects

The AFS offers a 4 1/2 day course on the use of rotenone and antimycin in fisheries management in Logan, Utah in late May of every year. The goal of the course is to provide students (typically fish biologists) with the tools, information and experience to plan and conduct a treatment. Included are classroom teaching modules, laboratory experiments, and mock field exercises. Classroom modules include lectures on piscicide science, planning and implementing treatments, and case histories of successful and unsuccessful projects. Students also break into smaller groups to plan different elements of a real-life treatment scenario.  Laboratory work includes toxicity experiments using trout to gain experience in handling chemicals and to observe their effects under different environmental conditions.  Students also construct three different types of drip cans.  Field exercises include learning to measure stream discharge to determine proper mixture of chemical:water and correctly callibrate drip can flow rates. Students also determine the proper amount of chemical for a lake treatment after calculating volume from a bathymetric map. Final field exercise includes demonstration of the powdered rotenone aspirator delivery system.  Student knowledge is evaluated with a final examination with passing students receiving a certificate of completion.