Where Did Goober Go?
Rather than always referring to them by number, staff working on this project sometimes name lake sturgeon tagged with ultrasonic transmitters after characters that appear in the books of Dr. Seuss. Thing One, Thing Two, and the Lorax are just a few of the names used. Radiotagged fish are named after characters from the old Andy Griffith Show. Barney, Opie, Aunt Bea and their friends have been teaching us a lot about the lives of lake sturgeon. Goober, a 23-pound male we caught and tagged just south of Hannibal in late March 2005, has been an especially interesting fish to follow. After tracking him for a little over a week, he disappeared. Although we searched for him nearly every day, we didn’t find him until 10 days later. He’d moved 18 miles downriver, to the town of Louisiana. Then, for some reason, he decided to head back upstream. Over the next six days we tracked him for another 80 miles as he made his way to Keokuk, Iowa. During that time he navigated around submerged rock dik
