TOPIC:

Seems strange that Indiana water would show poor spawning Lakers, but Illinois water has good spawning fish.

It would be nice to see our DNR take a stand with the fishermen. Keep our king stocking, Slash/cut the lake trout. Wasn't the DNR the ones pushing for lake trout and steelheads instead of Kings?

So how does the perfect coctail get created? Lake trout combined with steelhead, that end up eating more alewife then the kings we have?????????????? Time to drop the kings are the problem crap. Needs to stop right now!
Pressure is coming from who? The same fishermen that where vocal before the creation of the perfect cocktail? Many of us were just discarded to the wayside as the kings were cut, DNR wouldn't listen. The whole time many were saying your looking at the wrong picture, or looking at the same picture, just differently then the fishermen. We all want a healthy lake. But somwhere, there needs to be an understanding that we fishermen aren't stupid, just because we may lack a degree. Some of us were stewards to the lake before many DNR folks had jobs that they hold now. Not looking for a fight, rather this time I'm looking for the DNR to move toward the fishermen. This time for cuts, slash a lake trout and save an alewife.

It would be utterly absurd for Indiana to cut King stocking or abandon it all together.

Lets get this one right!

I've said this before and I'll say it again: since the government loves numbers, where are the stats on overall lake trout volume in the lake, and does that even exist? What I'm saying is, we're talking about a fish that lives a LONG time, so how do you analyze the volume of the existing population that's already out there, and how much more laker stockings the big lake can handle? Where I'm going with this is, even if God forbid the king stocking was too high on a given year, everything still cycles out after 4 years regardless, right? What's the answer if they mess up and overstock lake trout? Move limits up? Nope, not many target them nor can get to them for that matter to put a dent in populations. If the lake does collapse, I can't wait to have the conversation with the fishery folks and have him look me in the eye with their public relations talking points and say "yeah if we only cut even more kings we coulda saved the lake..." At that point, my respect level goes out the door for said representative, considering they blatantly ignored the lake trout impact.

To me the science is simple: nobody has an answer to the question of if there are too many lakers in the lake already!!?? What would it hurt taking off a full year of lake-wide laker stocking to correlate to the king reductions proposed? Let's play fair here: cut ALL predator fish stocking accordingly to compensate for the doom and gloom alewife scenario they are painting. If the alewife is truly the endangered species here, cut back anything then than could potentially eat it, and quit playing favors with greasers for Christ sake.

You don't understand, W-Man. According to the mindset of the Feds, the lakers are the endangered species. Alewives are an invasive species, as are salmon, steelheads and brown trout. It's not until things are put back to how they were before the invasive Europeans showed up they will be satisfied.

I just got off the phone with Tom Kleiman. Tom is from the group up in Wisconsin that is trying to turn some of this around. He is like many of us who grew up on the lake front. He seems to have a good handle on things and lobbist have been hired. Wisconsin has been using net pens with some really good results to hold there fingerlings for some time and then releaseing mostly at night to combat the predation that happens when fingerlings are released by the pumptruck. Wisconsin has been in the front on alot of projects trying to help cut down on fingerling loss, and keeping a healthy lake.
How does this affect us? We need to partner up with them. Anyway we can. If your a buisness that in some fashion has to do with the lake There group would love to hear from you. I gave him a run down on what has been happening here and how the fish look. I was told that he has received many calls from all over the lake and all not some, are saying the same thing, and seeing the same thing. So for us in Indiana it matters also. There is much going on fellas and if you enjoy your fishing you may have to take a stand to keep it. Tom is suppose to send me some more information, as it come I will keep you all posted.

Come on Ed, remember what they said at that meeting we went to last fall, a king every 10 hours of fishing is what they were shooting for. Has anyone looked into what the lakers are doing to the perch population? What I don't understand is why no one ever thought about natural reproduction years ago? They started stocking kings back when?, and just in the last couple of years they looked into it. Like b-nature said, I got the feeling coming out of that meeting the Indiana dnr was with the feds to bring the lake back to its natural state. When there done with that maybe they can use my salmon stamp money to bring back elk,grizzly bear, wolfs,black bears, and cougars so Indiana can go back to a natural state. Point being what's good for the water should be good for the land, don't think that will happen. Mike

Well if you took that conclusion away from our meeting at the Coho Club last fall, we must not have been very clear in communicating. So I apologize for any confusion that has caused. Our door is always open and we answer the phone every business day for anybody that wants to drop by or call.

Hopefully the below will clearly state and clarify a few things to your satisfaction:

We do not have a catch rate goal for chinooks in Indiana. Our goal is to balance predators and prey and maintain a healthy forage base that can support a healthy salmonid fishery. Furthermore, we talk about catch rates in number of fish per 100 angler hours, not in fish per 10. So I am not sure where the 1 chinook every 10 hours came from, since we don't use those units and we do not have a chinook catch rate goal.

I'll be as blunt as possible, echoing what Brother Nature said. It is impossible to return the lake to its natural state. The vast majority of the forage base is invasive species (alewife and gobies). Without those two invasives, we would have practically no sport fishery for anything. There are more than 180 invasive species in the lake. We're never going to be able to return the lake to it's pre-European state, or even to the state before the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Welland canal connected the Great Lakes to the world.

We have to work with the cards that we are dealt, which (in my opinion only, some other non-state agencies may differ) makes it completely foolish and impossible to return the lake to a natural state.

If we (and the other DNRs) wanted to crash the alewives, it would be extremely simple. We would convert all our hatchery capacity to chinooks, stock tens of millions per year, and the alewife would be gone (like in Lake Huron) in a couple years, 3 at most. The very reason we are reducing predation pressure is to build alewives back up, which is in direct conflict with a "natives only" agenda.

Wild reproduction has been thought of earlier. Depending on what you mean by "earlier". They weren't reproducing in large numbers through the 1970s-90s. After BKD episodes in the 90s and especially after alewife populations started dwindling at the same time that water quality was improving in spawning tributaries, wild reproduction started taking off. Wild reproduction had been investigated in the late 1990s using modeling approaches (but no basin-wide marking effort). It was known that there was some natural reproduction happening, especially in Michigan and Canada. But it was hard to put a number on it. Once Huron crashed in the early 2000s, it was a huge wakeup call, and for the last decade, wild reproduction has been tracked on an annual basis in both Lake Michigan and Lake Huron by marking every single chinook with oxytetracycline (2004-2010) and the federal mass marking program 2010-present. Without those efforts, and subsequent chinook cuts, it is very likely that what happened on Lake Huron would already have happened here.

Again, Indiana has no intention of going to a "natives only" fishery and we strongly support the salmonid fishery. Both personally and professionally.

Thank you for that response: I for one appreciate somebody from the DNR side of things injecting their input to any fishing or hunting website for that matter. And while fishermen do tend to speak out with their passions first over reason sometimes, I do think everyone here is making valid points.

Staying on topic though (and I don't mean to knit-pick either), but I do have one specific question about the post: it's in regards to the statement of "Our goal is to balance predators and prey and maintain a healthy forage base that can support a healthy salmonid fishery....the very reason we are reducing predation pressure is to build alewives back up." Whether it be on a state or federal level, who can provide the answers as to why lake trout are not considered an aggressive predator, and why their stockings are not being cut back DRAMATICALLY to play into that equation as well? And it's not just on this site that people are frustrated: it's everywhere you look in other state forums, including great lakes angler. The surrounding DNR state agencies do realize the only people primarily targeting these fish are charters, right? I mean sure, plenty get caught by accident all summer long, but they are not a purposely targeted fish sought by recreational anglers (other than maybe in the fall), nor a fish that people travel hours and plan vacation trips to catch.

Let me be as blunt as possible as well, and this is in no way meant to be condescending: are we at least on the same page that lake trout eat alewife and therefore, are a predator: correct?

We're on the same page. Lake trout are certainly considered a predator, and we know they eat plenty of alewife. If you read any of the lake trout rehabilitation documents, they specifically state that one of the impediments to lake trout rehabilitation is that they eat alewife, which inhibits reproduction (thiamine deficiency syndrome). Hence, why I stated that building up alewife is in direct conflict with lake trout restoration. To what degree it conflicts is up for debate depending on who you ask.

However, lake trout have the most diverse in diet of all the salmonids, and are very opportunistic. They are probably the best link right now between the lower end of the food chain and the predators - the quagga mussels siphon energy out of the water column, the gobies eat the mussels, and the lakers are the biggest consumers of gobies. So that is a positive.

We realize lake trout are far less desired by sport anglers, we only hear it about 365 days of the year. By phone, in person, at meetings. And we see it on forums. And so forth.

The reason we cut chinooks first is for a few reasons. 1) because the states have full control over silver fish, whereas lake trout are more complicated: there is the 2020 consent decree with tribes, which mandates by law a certain level of lake trout stocking in some areas, and because the USFWS stocks 99% of lake trout, so states do not have direct control. We (the states) had a pre-set agreement amongst ourselves regarding salmon, which made implementation of stocking reductions much easier, compared to wrangling with feds and tribes over lake trout for potentially years, all while alewives continued to decline precipitously.

2) because of how few alewives, and just as alarmingly, how few yearclasses of alewives were out there, we wanted to pull the emergency brake on alewife consumption, to reduce predation pressure as quickly as possible, and give them a chance to pull off some spawns and survive to older ages to spawn again (btw it looks like that is starting to work). Given how quickly chinooks grow and how much alewife they consume, cutting them was the fastest and easiest way to avoid crashing the alewife populations like happened in Lake Huron. For example, cutting lake trout stocking today would not really have much of an effect for 3-5 years, because they are slow growing. A chinook can grow to 20+ pounds in the same amount of time that it takes a lake trout to grow to 5 pounds.


Having said all that, the time is now to start talking about lake trout reduction. The Lake Michigan Committee already got that ball rolling last year, and asked the USFWS for the elimination of 500,000 fall fingerling lake trout. It's not a big dent in the numbers, but it was a start. I expect more serious conversations about lake trout stocking reductions to take place this summer at a lakewide meeting of scientists and managers.


Another option to consider is increasing the bag limit from 2 to 3 - not sure how popular that would be or how many anglers would take advantage of that. Thoughts?

Thanks Ben for the detailed explanations.