"Because of the pandemic, we don’t have the opportunity to engage anglers like we normally would," said to Chuck Bronte, senior fish biologist with the Service's Great Lakes Fish Tagging and Recovery Lab in Green Bay. "That’s the really important part, the tag recovery. That’s the business end of it."

Prior to its shutdown in March, the USFWS was able to tag some fish in Illinois, about 188,000 chinook salmon and 61,000 steelhead (rainbow trout), according to Bronte.