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Dirty wrote:

Some rational thoughts and some optimistic thoughts.........

1) Lets say 1.8M kings were stocked annually in recent years, now its cut in half. Based on the baitfish available, many of these fish could have died. We "might" not see all that much different results fishing. Still poor, but maybe not that different if more are surviving and we have a few good alewive class years.. And of course I could be completely wrong....but I am hopeful. At least they are not removing the chinooks entirely. They are trying to find a way to hold on.

2) I would rather see conservatism than destroy the fishery completely. It may rebound and stocking numbers might increase in the future if/when the baitfish situation improves.

3) Yes stocking lake trout still sucks and should be decreased. To me its the bigger problem.

4) We still have coho and steelhead.......as much as it pains me to say it. Their diets are more diverse. Every coho I cought this weekend had gobies in them.

5) Stocking the baitfish is unfeasible. The amount required to make a difference is unfathomable. This would never work unless the predators were gone or greatly diminished.

I am addicted to fishing for kings and if we are to have any chance at a future this is needed. Partly because they are the top predator for alewives and partly because of political BS and the fed lake trout stocking. I am hopeful that reducing the kings in combination with the charters only hammering lake trout restores the some balance of the lake trout and available bait. The DNR knows that a great deal of the fishing interest revolves around kings, which buys the licenses and supports their efforts.

Couldn't have said it better myself, Jeff.

There are a lot of details yet to figure out in each state, but it is likely that Indiana will try to stock more coho or steelhead (or potentially browns) instead of planting a pittance of kings. They have more diverse diets and do not eat nearly as much as kings.

As far as the Indiana open-water king fishery, last few years it has been 67-75% wild fish. A 62% cut to stocking sound enormous, but 62% of the proportion of stocked kings (lets call it 30% on average) is about 18% reduction in absolute terms once you figure in the wild fish.

My hope is that we continue to see healthy fish, and that the alewives can manage a couple consecutive spawns. Once we start seeing increasing sizes and body condition of fish for multiple years in a row (instead of the yo-yo effect we have seen the past decade or so) then it will be time to ramp king stocking back up.

It's important to note that all the DNRs around the lake know that kings are the most desired fish in the lake, AND they are also the cheapest to raise in the hatchery - it's the best bang for the buck out there. The agencies don't want to cut kings any more than the anglers, but at this point it's the best way to avoid going the way of Lake Huron and completely eliminating the alewife populations for good

Ben thank you for posting we really appreciate it. What would you expect natural repoduction rates to be with a couple years of this lowered stocking. My feeling is lower number of stocked fish in natural reproducing rivers will result in lower number of natural reproduced fish. Just something I was thinking about at work here.

Tim, that is a hard thing to get a handle on. There's a few factors at play. In some systems, reducing the amount of stocked fish actually boosts natural recruitment, because the stocked juvenile fish were competing with the wild juvenile fish for food in the river system, which can repress the wild fish. It could also be that reducing stockings in rivers with wild recruitment will reduce the number of fish coming back to spawn, which could reduce the total output of smolts.

But really, the biggest factor of wild recruitment is the baitfish population. If you don't have small alewives for small kings to eat, how many smolts get produced in the river is sort of a moot point, as they will starve to death once they hit the big lake

Also, a large portion of the wild fish in Lake Michigan are produced in Canadian tributaries to Lake Huron, which never see stocked fish in the first place, so it is unlikely that reducing plants in Lake Michigan would affect that dynamic much at all

Good stuff thank you. Any info on how well yoy alewives made it through the winter?

No concrete info on how well YOY alewives made it through the winter - acoustic and bottom trawl surveys don't start until late summer/early fall

Lots of anecdotes of people seeing small alewives though, which is a good thing

Thanks for the info everyone. Just to clarify on my original post - I know that DNR is doing what is best for the fishery and lake. . It is a tough situation that we can hope gets turned around.

No wonder our state is considering eliminating kings altogether. Somebody help me out, but I thought I remembered a return rate of like 1%-2%. That would leave us with 450 kings returning for the whole coast..east chicago to mich city. Definitely not worth the effort. I hope they double coho and steelhead for you guys!!