A Hammer Looking for Nails or Tags Looking for Fish: Lessons Learned from Application of Acoustic Telemetry in the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes Acoustic Telemetry Observation System began in 2010 and brought the first large spatial and temporal scale acoustic telemetry technology to the Great Lakes.  Acoustic telemetry provides time-resolved geo-spatial data with multiple observations of the same fish spanning time scales of weeks to years. Four projects were the initial focal points for the program within the waters of the St. Marys River, Lake Huron, St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, Detroit River, and Lake Erie.  Now among 16 total projects, a total of 30 species and more than 4,000 fish have been tagged yielding more than 69 million fish detections.  Lessons learned- Develop strategies for data analyses and paper writing to overcome the overwhelming feeling of 69 million tag detections. Some projects proposed were discouraged because of poorly defined research questions and seemed simply to be a hammer looking for a nail.  Lessons learned – Be wary of “let’s tag some fish and see where they go” projects.  Projects are encouraged to adopt a highly defined and somewhat redundant approach of specifying a research question and hypothesis with an accompanying prediction of what the data would look like to support the hypothesis if it was true.