A Department of Interior grant will allocate $472,150 to teach bonytails and sucker fish survival techniques, CNS News reports:
The Department of Interior will be spending $472,150 to teach survival skills to bonytails and sucker fish.
"The objective of the proposed project is to determine if training increases Bonytail and Razorback Sucker survival when exposed to predators," the grant abstract states.
"This proposal builds upon the 2012 Bureau of Reclamation assistance agreement with the Arizona Game and Fish Department (AZGFD) tasked with investigating the potential for training Bonytail and Razorback Suckers to recognize and avoid predators," says the abstract for the program.
"One of the early conclusions of the prior work is that the schooling behavior of Bonytail may allow untrained fish to show improved survival because they recognize predator avoidance behaviors exhibited by trained individuals," the abstract states.
[...]
The abstract gives the three "components" of the almost half-a-million dollar project:
1) Pond restoration
2) Intensive predator avoidance training and marking
3) Remote sensing of marked fish to assess short-term post-training survival
The $400,000 grant to train fish is hardly the only recent example of questionable tax dollar use by the federal government.
A May investigation revealed a Richmond firm has received $500,000 in federal stimulus to build a recycling plant, yet has built nothing and created no jobs.
As of October 2012, the federal government had approximately 1,900 open cases investigating possible misuse of stimulus funds.