Speckled Trout Research May Change Fishing Industry: CORPUS CHRISTI -- You could say something "fishy" is going on at the Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M Corpus Christi.
Folks there are studying speckled trout, the number one game fish in this area.
Endowed Chair for Fishery of Ocean Health, Dr. Greg Stunz, said, "We're beginning to see a downward trend of these populations and that's what has us concerned."
So researchers decided to catch up with the trout.
Graduate Research Assistant, Laura Bivins, said, "There's quite a few things we've seen that are really interesting."
Researchers catch the fish and then make a small incision into the trout and insert a transmitter so they can keep track of where the fish go.
There are 23 receivers in the water between Port Mansfield and Port Aransas.
Bivins said, "As fish swim by these receivers it picks up the unique code of this tag so I can track where each individual fish has gone."
Researchers found the speckled trout move around quite a bit.
They also noticed there's less of the fish in Coastal Bend waters.
Stunz said, "There's more and more anglers literally everyday joining the fishery and it's pretty amazing to think the Bay can support that type of withdraw but it has so far but we may just begin to see some of the impacts of that pressure."
In January, the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife will hold meetings to recommend anglers catch only five speckled trout a day instead of ten, it's a move that could help boost the population to where it was in the 90's.
Stunz said, "In other regions where that's happened we've seen drastic improvements in the fishery."
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