I received a second response from Mr. Dickinson and wanted to share with everyone. Moderators, if this isn't the right place, you can move where you deem it appropriate.
Mike,
Sometimes we have a hard time reaching folks with our information. And even if we do, there’s some misinterpretation that occurs, such as this post
southender.proboards.com/thread/2352/chi...h-city#ixzz3Y4JjBPu2
It was awesome that someone went to the meeting and relayed the info online to other guys that couldn’t attend, but unfortunately some of it was quite off base:
The question was asked at the Coho Club meeting about kings from Lake Ontario traveling to Lake Michigan, and the answer was that no, we have not seen any kings from Lake Ontario show up in either Lake Huron or Lake Michigan, and vice versa. Not sure how that turned into Lake Ontario kings being found in Lake Michigan J. So far the only inter-lake movement of Chinook that has been documented has been travel between Huron and Michigan.
Additionally, it’s pretty hard to interpret some of the mass marking recovery graphs, one of which I attached here. Basically, the graphic I attached is made from data collected from all the tagged fish caught in Michigan City from 2012-2014. It shows the stocking location of all the tagged fish recovered in Michigan City. What it’s telling us is that after adjusting for numbers stocked, we’re catching a lot more fish in Michigan City that were stocked in Wisconsin than we should be. And it’s like that for almost every port, which suggests that fish stocked in many Wisconsin ports are surviving better than fish stocked elsewhere. This is probably because little Chinooks eat a lot of bugs, and prevailing westerly winds from Wisconsin probably blow more bugs out than they do on the east side of the lake, which doesn’t see a lot of easterly winds to push bugs offshore. Plus on the western shore there’s more bottom structure/rocks, lots more current upwelling, and so forth that could help concentrate food in areas available to baby Chinooks, which would increase survival. Those are just theories at this point, but they seem plausible.
Also there was some discussion in this post about % wild (unclipped) Chinooks, and they missed a pretty big nuance of what was reported at the meeting. Every year the % wild of 1 year old Chinooks is measured, along with the % wild of ALL Chinooks. In 2014 the wild 1 year old Chinooks plunged in abundance (see attached graphic), whereas the overall rate of wild Chinook (all ages) stayed at about 60% or so. The graphic probably even understates how big a dip in wild 1 year olds we saw in 2014, because we cut that stocking 50% in 2013, so there were half as many fish in the “denominator” of that equation.
We think the 2014 decline in wild 1-year old fish is because of 3 large factors: a poor 2013 alewife year class, and the extremely harsh winter of 2013, which both probably lead to bad survival, and also just lower numbers of Chinooks produced due to the extremely hot and dry summer/fall of 2012, which due to extremely low river flows and high temperatures, prevented many Chinooks from spawning in the Michigan rivers that produce many of the wild Chinooks in Lake Michigan. That’s why in my first email I predicted there wouldn’t be as many 5-10 lb kings this year, because those 1 year olds from 2014 are going to be 2 year olds this year in the 5-10 pound range.
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