Inland Fisheries Internship Report

Goals and Objectives:

The Department of Game and Inland Fisheries’ vision statement is about inspiring people to connect with nature and the environment, which is a quality that I am looking for potential careers. Therefore, that is one of the reasons this internship was a great match for me. My goals for this internship were to experience a career in the environmental studies field that would allow me to experience different types of work, such as field work and lab work instead of only desk work. I did not get to experience any true fieldwork because it was January, but I did get to visit a few sites such as the Fish way at Boshers Dam and the VCU Rice Center. In place of the fieldwork, I did get the opportunity to experience a lot of lab

The fish counter is composed of 16 tunnels, but to run the trials, we used a single PVC pipe to act as our test counter and wired it so we could use the single tube to test all 16 channels. The system has different levels of sensitivity which correlate to the size of the fish you want it to be able to sense. We placed the counter into a large tub and chased the fish around so it would swim through the test counter. We tried a range of channels, each with different sensitivity levels. We recorded each whether or not the counter actually counted the fish and then determined the percent accuracy for each level of sensitivity. This is important to test before it is actually in real-life use because we need to know the accuracy of the counter itself so we know the limitations when we use the counter to calculate population sizes and migration patterns. We also collected valuable data regarding what happens to the counter when a fish stops swimming and just sits in the tunnel, when a fish swims into the tunnel and then turns around and swims out the same way it entered, or if the fish was swimming really fast or really slow (even though speed should not be a factor). We found that in some cases, if the fish has passed at least two out of the

I wanted an internship that gave me the opportunity to work outside of an office and learn something about a subject that I did not know before I started my internship. In this internship, I learned a lot about fish that I did not know before such as how to identify certain species, how population issues are talked about and dealt with in the real-world, and how professionals in their field interact with each other and work together. Overall, this internship did not change my mind in what type of career I want in the future because I really enjoyed this internship and the aspect of doing something different everyday. Having the opportunity to experience two different careers within one internship, I learned that I most likely do not want to continue my career by working with otoliths because it did get very repetitive and boring. However, this overall experience makes me look forward to starting my career and eventually consider going into