Replicating nature
Fish biologist Kurt Heim waded through the waist deep Saranac River current as technician Dylan Jennison's feet splashed through the shallows along the shoreline. Each man, dressed in a tan dry suit, held the end of a net.
“Yeah, we got a fish,” Jennison yelled. It was early November. Trees were mostly bare, snow had started gathering in the highest peaks, and Atlantic salmon were finishing up their fall migration up Lake Champlain tributaries.
On this day, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service crew was working on a new 9-year stocking study that relies on parentage-based tagging, a novel method of tracking fish by tracing their familial roots through DNA. Traditionally, the
