Fisheries Biologist, Muncie Sanitary District Bureau of Water Quality

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.