TOPIC:

Michigan spends about $10 million a year to operate six hatcheries statewide, raising a mix of species including walleye, muskie, pike, sturgeon, trout and salmon. Three-quarters of the funding comes from hunting and fishing licence fees, with the remainder from a federal excise tax on sporting equipment and certain gas taxes, Dexter said.

Chinook cost the DNR about 43 cents each to raise, compared to 93 cents for coho salmon. That's because chinook need only about 4 months of hatchery time, compared to coho's 16 months, Dexter said. Inland, brook, and brown trout are all even more expensive to raise, he said, around $1.50 each.

Southshore here are some facts. Could you please show your facts to support your opinions and thoughts for your #1 and your #2?

www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultura...es/carrying-capacity

Take a look at the integral equation described in this little article. If you’re clear on N, r, and K and how they relate to this discussion, I’ll carry on.

If that's something I studied in college, I must have skipped that day....

southshore says, " If we start using pens and all the sudden the number of survivors doubled or tripled, that would have the same net effect on the baitfish population as continuing current practices but sticking double or triple the amount of fish."
EXACTLY!!
Addendum: If Indiana has no returning fish there is no evidence our Chinook stocking is having any impact on the baitfish population. What we do have evidence of is bait and no fall Kings.

Net results as it stands now is we are wasting time and money. Some of us remember what a fall King run looks like and it isn't an occasional 30 lb. fish in Michigan and Wisconsin.

John, interesting read.
Still no defense for your # 1, so have you realized your statement may have been wrong?
Your #2,,,,, Instead of going down the rabbit hole your trying to move to let me say this.
When you point your finger and say that some of us are barking up the wrong tree, my response to your opinion is this: " If your not part of the solution you might be part of the problem"

In terms of money to raise a fish, keep in mind that it's fuzzy math at best. It's a useful number to have on hand, but it has significant limits so it shouldn't be the be-all-end all, but more of a relative thing. The biggest hatchery costs are operational costs - the staff, and the energy usage and maintenance. Those are pretty fixed costs and don't really change much regardless of how many of each fish species are raised. So you can imagine that the cost per fish depends significantly on how many fish are raised. So the per-fish cost can change immensely depending on how many fish you are producing at a certain hatchery. Especially kings, since you can raise a large amount of them (yes, they are stocked at about 5 months or so) in a very small space compared to all the other salmonids, which are typically stocked at 12-16 months old. If you ran the math on cost per chinook in 2019, when 75K were raised at Mixsawbah, you'd get a much different (higher) cost per fish than in 2020, when there are going to be 225K raised.

I'm not sure what southshore is driving at exactly and don't want to put words in his mouth, but the carrying capacity of the lake to support salmon is of immense concern. That is what the last few years and cuts and such have been all about. Typically we like to listen to what nature is telling us. If the food web is broken such that baby chinooks are not surviving, perhaps that is also telling us that we should be mindful of artificially pumping up that survival and pressuring what forage is out there. Nature always finds a balance - but we'd prefer it to be a balance that we like, not a balance of no salmon and no bait. If survival of all stocked kings lakewide was instantly doubled or tripled, that would probably not be the best long-term thing, for example, because current stocking numbers were arrived at in large part accounting for current survival rates. Just food for thought.

In terms of East Chicago, yes the 2016 yearclass of fish was the only one stocked there, rather than Buffington Harbor. I thought it was silly to be stocking fish where there was no shore access, so we moved it to EC. They would have returned as 2 year olds in 2018 and 3 year olds in 2019. There was a very poor return of chinook in general this year everywhere on the south end.

In any case, Ed raises a lot of good points. There has been a lot of comparison with what other states are doing and bickering over lakewide stuff. But perhaps for us in Indiana, we should be talking more about what we can do with the resources we have available, to create the best fishery (what does that even mean, anyways?) for Indiana. How SHOULD we divvy up the chinooks? Would stocking them all in one port create a pretty darn good fall fishery? Would that be better than 3 mediocre or below average fisheries? What about 2 ports? Or should we stick with 3? How do net pens factor in? Is stocking 225K kings the best use of our resources in the first place?

There's no one good answer and everybody will have different ideas. But it's good to talk about them without getting sidetracked into things that we have little influence over

I think the argument with Indiana’s stocking numbers is that they are set with the idea that Indiana kings are going to impact the forage base just as much as a Wisconsin or Michigan stocked fish. However, if only a teeny-tiny percentage survive to the size they can eat alewives, the affect of Indiana kings on the forage is over exaggerated.

We can’t (or at least are reluctant) to pull a “Wisconsin” and just add more stocked fish. So the effort needs to be to boost Indiana’s baby king survival up to whatever is judged to be “par” with the other states.

I realize the plankton and zooplankton abundance, these days, are not near the levels which were present a couple of decades ago. In general, more turbidity equals more nutrients equals higher levels of food for teeny fish and when I look at the water clarity here at the Southend compared to the water clarity to the north in Michigan and Wisconsin, it’s hard to understand why their baby kings can find enough to eat and ours starve to death.

Your baby Kings aren’t starving to death, they are being eaten immediately upon entering the lake by what has to be the worlds largest concentrated population of lake trout. Check your trout stomachs in May if you aren’t just fishing for silver. You will find your baby kings.

Over the years The DNR has reduced Chinook stockings multiple times while the Fish and Wildlife Service continued increased Lake Trout stocking. The evidence is in the stocking reports and the Trout have all but wiped out the gobies. I don't check stomach contents but see no reason why any predator would pass on eating a little Chinook smolt.
At 3 1/2" in length the little silver Chinooks are the perfect prey for everything from birds to the large mass of Trout and Salmon the south end hosts in the spring.
After fishing the fall king run for decades I never thought I would say this, but I have to wonder if we've reached the point of no return(no pun intended). Natural reproduction in the North is no longer allowing the stocking numbers needed in the south to ensure enough fish survive for a fall run. All harbors face a different set of circumstances when stocking Chinook and if Indiana's fish are being eaten by the overstocked trout and naturally reproduced Salmon from the North in the spring, we should be allowed larger numbers. If for no other reason, to make sure Michigan and Wisconsin's fish are well fed when they pass through Indiana in the Spring.

Lol that would be great justification! All kidding aside, predation on sportfish species smolts such as chinook and brown trout is a really big deal...via the mouths of lake trout. It is believed that coho imprint really quick and leave the scene, but chinook in particular wander around near harbors and shorelines and are very susceptible to predation by lake trout. In rivers such as the st joe, Kalamazoo and Muskegon we have huge issues with predation by walleye, which are 10 times the apex predator a lake trout is. We used to stock chinook using a numbers game philosophy....more smolts stocked, strength in numbers, more escapees. Now when you are talking sub 100,000 or even sub 20,000 numbers...there is no chance. This is why Indiana really should look at stocking all their kings in a single port each year, rotating ports every year. You spread them out, they are all doomed. Michigan has provided mortality numbers for chinook stocking. 50% of chinook stocked never make it out of the pier heads. 50% of the remaining never make it past year one. 50% of those who make it past year 1 dont make it past year 2. After we catch a lot of them and other natural mortality, around 3% of the number of fish we stocked three years prior actually show back up to the pier heads to run rivers and spawn. It’s a math game. Biologists love to throw around wild chinook estimates of 1 million to 7 million wild chinook of alewife eating age swimming around the lake at any given time. Thats basically saying there are between 1 and 7 million 1.5 - 3 year old WILD chinook swimming around the lake at any given time. Strange though, anglers dont seem to catch them (based upon creel records) and they certainly dont show up to rivers or weirs to be counted in those numbers either...and that includes the infamous “Lake Huron Canadian rivers”. I have fish those rivers, and Michigan natural reproduction rivers, every year. There is not 1-7 million kings returning to any of them or in any combination. Weir return numbers at Michigans largest stocking sites are what, a couple thousand kings a year? It’s a numbers deal, and the numbers do not add up. If you are going to spend the time net penning and all that, you are best served to stock them all in one port, strength in numbers, give them a chance. You can switch ports every year if you want, but spreading them thin to multiple ports “michigan style” is a waste of time. The baby kings will simply will not make it through the predator gauntlet.