Tautog!

Just south of Bullocks Point in East Providence, we trawled aboard Alletta Morris for a few minutes and all of a sudden the boat had stopped moving forward. We have a small camp this week with the Paul Cuffee School, so Captain Amy, Jean, Katie and I had to do a little extra pulling to get the net onboard. It was difficult to pull, as it seemed we had gotten our net caught on a large bottom dwelling object, but all of a sudden it was set loose. Whatever had stopped us had been removed, but the net was still heavy.

We got it up a little further so we could see the trawl net, and noticed that there was some large flapping going on in the belly of the net. We pulled the net out of the water, and the flapping moved to the cod-end. There were a couple of large fish.

“Tautog!”

We don’t often get tautog this large in our net, so I was excited. I get excited whenever we catch any “real” fish, and there were two! We untied the daisy chain and freed the fish into our water basins.

I had the campers look up the fish in a field guide, and once they identified them correctly, I had them observe the fish closely. They were clearly different in color pattern and in forehead shape. I taught them that the males have a larger forehead bump, whereas the females have a much smoother snout to dorsal transition. The coloration around the mouth is also very interesting; they are nicknamed "white chins". Both fish were right around 20”, though the male had more girth and weight to him.

It was the first time many of the students – and some of the staff – had seen tautog this large!

For more information on tautog, visit http://www.mass.gov/dfwele/dmf/recreationalfishing/tautog.htm
Or http://counties.cce.cornell.edu/suffolk/Fisheries/species/tautog.pdf
Or http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/SpeciesSummary.php?id=458