-: My name is Drew Holloway.
I'm a fisheries biologist
for the Muncie Sanitary District's Bureau of Water Quality.
So a fisheries biologist is going to be
someone that uses fish as biological indicators
to see what sorts of things we see in a stream
and base them off of the fish that we're finding.
Through standardized electric fishing techniques,
we actually put a very small pulsed electric current
into the water that will temporarily immobilize the fish.
Once the fish are immobilized,
me and my crew will net all of the fish together,
separate them on a species level,
and then release them in the wild
after we take things like length,
weight, minimum/maximum lengths as well.
Release them back into the wild
and it is a non-lethal form of biological monitoring.
So once we get all of our measurements
for the fish community,
we take those numbers and we put them into a computer,
and we calculate what they call the IBI,
or the Index of Biotic Integrity.
And what that does is a narrative score
from 0 to 60 that bases it off of 12 individual metrics,
0 being very poor to 60 being excellent.
And that tells us how healthy the stream is
based off the fish community found.
Once we get back to the office,
we compile all of our data.
Like I said, we put it in our computer
to determine the scores on the health of the river.
Then we take all that information,
we write our yearly report that is distributed to the public
so that people know exactly what type of fish
and the resources they have available to find out
about the fish found in the West Fork of White River.
So throughout the year we take the information
that we have received from the stream samples that we do,
and we go to professional conferences and give talks.
Talk to a lot of like-minded individuals
about the work that we do
in order to better understand exactly what we're seeing
so we can get a better approach to doing what we do
and kind of hone in based off of other people's opinions
and their knowledge.
I like to do presentations to a lot of the local schools
if I have the opportunity,
so a couple of those a year.
And then I also speak to a lot of college groups.
I'm part of a group
called The Indiana American Fisheries Society
and we use groups like Ball State, Purdue, Manchester,
some of these other schools that have fisheries groups,
so we go talk to them about our career
and try to encourage them to get internships
to get the experience needed
to become a fisheries biologist.