This summer, 300,000 lake trout fingerlings at the Marquette State Fish Hatchery were slated for fin-clipping prior to release into northern Lake Huron and southern Lake Michigan.

The annual task is carried out by fisheries personnel with the Department of Natural Resources as part of an interagency agreement among the Great Lakes states to mark all hatchery-reared lake trout for research and monitoring.

But this year, for the first time, these sensitive fingerlings were marked without ever coming into contact with a human hand.

The automated technology, known as the AutoFish System, that made this possible usually would cost more than $1 million. But thanks to an innovative partnership that involved private industry, the federal government and the DNR, AutoFish actually saved the DNR Fisheries Division an estimated $6,000 from its budget.

So what's the catch?

Northwest Marine Technology, the makers of the AutoFish System, needed a location to test and tweak lake trout modifications to their mobile AutoFish trailer, which originally was designed to handle salmon. The Marquette hatchery was the right spot.

"We allowed Northwest Marine Technology to test their system at the hatchery, provided they marked all of our lake trout for free," said Upper Peninsula area hatchery manager Jan VanAmberg. "Considering current budget cuts and staff shortages, this was a great opportunity to meet our marking requirements while staying under budget. We also were able to witness firsthand the future of fish-marking technology."

And it's likely the Marquette hatchery staff will work with AutoFish in the future, considering the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has plans to purchase a dozen AutoFish trailers, once the company has completed updating its technology to fit the specific size and behavior parameters of lake trout.

VanAmberg believes the USFWS-owned AutoFish trailers eventually will be used to mark all of the salmon and lake trout produced by hatcheries in the Great Lakes states.

"Having the USFWS provide an AutoFish trailer each year will really improve our efficiency versus traditional hand-tagging and marking," VanAmberg said. "Instead of processing about 20,000 fish per day manually, the AutoFish System can do 30,000 each day."

The AutoFish System clips the adipose fin of each fish and inserts a tiny stainless steel wire, with coded information specific to that batch of fingerlings, into the fish's snout. This is all done by only two or three people, who handle quality control and monitor fish health.

In comparison, hand-marking lake trout requires the DNR to hire and train a team of five to six short-term workers each year, who manually remove the adipose fin -- a process that costs about $8,000.

This year, the only cost to the hatchery for marking all 300,000 lakers was an estimated $2,000, which helped cover transportation costs to bring the AutoFish trailer from the Iron River National Fish Hatchery in Wisconsin to the hatchery in the Upper Peninsula.

In addition to improving the efficiency and cost of the fish-marking process, the AutoFish System also is more fish-friendly.

Instead of anesthetizing and handling each fish, which requires removing it from water for at least a few seconds, the AutoFish System allows lake trout to stay in the water throughout the entire process and avoid any handling by humans.

"Research has shown that the stress hormones in fish that spike during the marking process return to a normal level much faster when the AutoFish is used than when the fish are handled manually," said Northwest Marine Technology fish biologist Joel Lahaie, one of three research and development staff who manned the AutoFish trailer during four 10-day stints in Marquette this summer.

"If a fish were already weak or susceptible to disease, elevated stress levels over a longer period of time can prove fatal," Lahaie said. "The fish also are shown to return to regular feeding activity much more quickly when the process is automated versus manual."

When an AutoFish System is used, the process begins with the fish entering a holding tank in the AutoFish trailer, which is full of water that has been pumped in from the hatchery's holding ponds, allowing the lake trout to stay at the same temperature and oxygen levels experienced in the hatchery ponds.

Next, the fish follow a current through several tubes, where they are automatically measured and sorted into one of six marking lines depending on size. They again spend a few minutes in a holding tank before following the current into another tube, where they end up with their noses against a specially-sized mold. Immediately, automated clamps grasp the sides of the fish and momentarily immobilize it.

A computer then snaps a picture of the fish to ensure its orientation is correct before the AutoFish System automatically clips the adipose fin off the fish's back. Once the clipping has been done, the computer takes another image to ensure the fin was correctly removed.

Simultaneously, a small, coded wire tag, only 1.1 millimeters in length, is inserted through the fatty tissue in the fish's snout, which is still resting against the nose mold. The fish is then sent on to another part of the AutoFish, where a sensor checks that the coded wire tag was inserted correctly.

The marking and tagging occurs in less than two seconds, after which the lake trout is released back into tubing that leads directly to the hatchery holding ponds where the fingerling originated.

"In addition to the fish experiencing lower stress levels, it has been shown that the fin clipping is much more consistent when done with AutoFish than by hand," Lahaie said. "There also is a much higher retention rate for the nose tags when they are placed this way, which means the hatcheries are going to have more results to study when marked fish are caught and tags are sent to the lab for analysis."

The information coded on the wire tag includes the strain of fish, the hatchery where it was produced, and when and where the fish was stocked. If the fish is caught, the information allows DNR fisheries managers to evaluate the success of fish stocking programs and assess the age, growth, survival rates and movement patterns of stocked fish.

Anglers who catch a lake trout with a missing adipose fin are asked to remove the fish's head or snout and bring it, plus date caught and location, to a designated drop-off station, which are listed online at www.michigan.gov/taggedfish on the "Coded Wire Tags" page.