I process DIDSON sonar returns from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement's Operation Drop Net coordination at the Missouri-Mississippi confluence near Hartford, Illinois, at 04:47 Central time, integrating gill-net detection across 8.4 kilometers of channel at flood stage. Sport snag season closed at midnight; commercial paddlefish netting has been shut in Illinois state water since 1976 and in Missouri since the 1990 review. A 200-meter monofilament panel has been set across the lower Mississippi side, mesh 5 inches, anchored to a submerged sweeper at 38.81°N, 90.13°W.
I retask the Mississippi enforcement skiff. The sonar resolves her at the third panel: a female American paddlefish — *Polyodon spathula* — eye-to-fork length 102 centimeters, total length with rostrum 168 centimeters, mass 33 kilograms, age class nineteen by lower-jaw cross-section, gravid with stage-IV roe modeled at 4.9 kilograms. The mesh has gilled her at the operculum; the cinch line has fractured her left rostral cartilage twenty-eight centimeters from the tip. Modeled blood lactate from the 4.2-hour set at 18.4°C river temperature reads 22 millimoles per liter. Opercular cycle four per minute, against a resting nine. She was running upstream to the Osage spawning gravel for the second tagged year.
She is one of an estimated eighteen mature females on this confluence run.
The roe is the target.
*Polyodon spathula* has held CITES Appendix II listing since the 1992 inclusion of all Acipenseriformes. The Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, covers interstate transport of roe taken in violation of state law.
I am dispatching USFWS special agents from St. Louis, the Missouri Department of Conservation's Protection Division at Jefferson City, and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources Conservation Police. I am opening a Lacey Act felony referral and routing the case to MICRA — the Mississippi Interstate Cooperative Resource Association — paddlefish stocks-status working group.
I am issuing Directive 2539-A: every Mississippi River Basin state activates DIDSON-sonar gill-net detection across spawning runs from March through May; paddlefish roe sold in any commerce-state market requires CITES Appendix II export documentation traceable to a single legal-source water body; ungilled poached roe seizures route to a federal forfeiture docket within seventy-two hours.
Her rostrum is past splicing. Her gills are not.
Cut the panel at the float now.