Des Moines Iowa — The first deadline to buy paddlefish licenses for the Missouri River ended Thursday December 31st.
D-N-R Regional Fisheries Supervisor, Chris Larson, says you were allowed to buy one license through Thursday.
(as said)”If there are licenses leftover — which there’s been quite a few the last several years, so I expect some to be leftover — you can purchase an additional tag from January 1st through January 7th,” Larson says.
He says if there are enough tags left, you can buy two in the January period. The licenses are not sold in stores like regular Iowa fishing licenses.
(as said)He says you have to go online to buy them and after January 7th the licenses will be processed and they will mail the licenses, tag, and other information for the season that starts February 1st.
Larson says the paddlefish is an interesting one to study.
(as said)”They’ve been around for a million years. One of the interesting things about a paddlefish, they have no bone. All the inner skeletal areas are made of cartilage,” according to Larson. “They’ve been around forever. They have a big long snout sticking out in front of them — which is kind of a sensory organ — sometimes it can be a third of the length of the fish. They look ancient, they almost look like a shark in some respects, they have no teeth.”
Larson says the paddlefish population has continued to do well after they re-opened the season back in 2015.
(as said)”The population that is in the Missouri River around us travel all the way up the Mississippi and all the way up to Gavins Point Dam (South Dakota). We really haven’t seen a true downward trend. We haven’t seen a great increase either, so they are really maintaining,” he says. “We did a tagging study..about 2013, and it showed we are getting the same fish that South Dakota and Nebraska are snagging up at the Gavins Point Dam. And we had the same fish that we tagged here caught down by Tennessee.”
Larson says you can go to the D-N-R website and learn how to get a license for the paddlefish season.
