I also value your friendship Ed and thanks for being the voice of reason. Yes, I get a little frustrated when I read articles claiming Tanner stocked Salmon to rid the lake of alewives by people who claim to be fisheries experts. I trust Ben will do what he feels is best for everyone and grateful he is giving us the opportunity to ask questions and air our concerns.
Trust me, that frustrates many biologists and managers as well. It was one of those tropes that got started back in the day and was said so often in the media and in the angling public that it just became accepted. Even by some within the management community, regrettably. Tanner himself said he did it to create a sport fishery, not to control alewife. Although if I recall correctly, in his book he alluded to taking some credit for the reduction in alewife die-off, because it was a convenient correlation (though not causation) and in doing so he might have built support for his stocking program. In any case, I have a federal report from 1970 in my office talking about how to address alewife die-offs seen in 1967-1968, and the only mention of biological control basically says that predation by trout and salmon is not enough to significantly influence alewife populations in the foreseeable future (1970s). At the time, almost all the discussions surrounded commercial alewife fisheries, or beach mitigation strategies. Using stocked salmonids to control alewife wasn't even really a consideration, other than that in the future it should be determined how many alewife were needed to sustain the salmonid fishery, when considering how many to remove via commercial fishing or other means.
I'd also like to point out what might seem like a subtle nuance, but is actually a pretty important distinction: science and management are two different things. Management has to consider a lot of often competing goals, and both the economic/cultural/human side of things in addition to simply the biological aspects. Just because a scientific report is written that says "to achieve ABC, X, Y, and Z should occur" doesn't mean that managers will implement X Y and Z, because doing so might be detrimental to the rest of the alphabet, so to speak. And, university researchers or academic folks often have different viewpoints on what a system should be look like. So it can be a bit frustrating for managers when scientific reports or quotes from academics are held up as proof of management agenda.
Lake Michigan is a disturbed ecosystem. It will NEVER return to pre-Welland canal, pre-overfishing, pre-habitat destruction state. It's simply impossible. Yes, there's a place for native species. They have high cultural value for some, and also substantial ecosystem value. But to believe that native species should predominate a lake that is so changed from where it was before massive biological and physical/chemical change is somewhat of a naive or misplaced ideal, in my personal opinion. Other people in the natural resources field might vehemently disagree - we have different values. But, right now in Lake Michigan, the bulk of the forage base are invasive species (gobies and alewifes). Even the plankton community that supports juvenile fish has a large portion of invasive species in it. It's just not prudent or desirable to go back to a more "native only" predator community.
Lake Michigan managers aren't managing the lake with an end goal of domination by native species. I know it might seem like it... but trust me, if managers wanted to make Lake Michigan dominated by lake trout, all they'd have to do is stock 15 million kings a year, wait a couple years for the inevitable crash of the alewife population, and see an explosion in lake trout reproduction as a result of releasing them from the negative reproductive effects of eating alewife.
Ed raised a good question about increasing harvest for lake trout during the fall-winter months, when lake trout are nearshore in Indiana. Most data show that a good chunk of those fish are from the stockings which occurred in Indiana during the 2000s and 2010s. Those stockings were discontinued a few years ago. There's very few wild fish coming out of our waters, at least where much of the fishing effort is happening, like the Port of Indiana. So increasing harvest of mostly stocked fish, combined with the stocking being eliminated means that in a few years, those fisheries would probably peter out. Personally I think the minimal reduction in predation pressure (in the grand scheme of things) that eliminating that specific fishery would not be worth sacrificing the growing angler effort spent targeting lake trout jigging during the colder months, but that's just my opinion. A lot of people have started to take advantage of those fish and it provides a pretty unique fishery at a time when not much of one existed before - pretty cool that you can catch 10+ pound fish on light tackle in November and December.
Last thing I'll leave for people to ponder - in terms of going back in time and not having the Joint Strategic Plan and cooperative, consensus based management of Lake Michigan, I think it's also important to consider what things would look like today if we used a time machine to avoid any consensus based management agreement being established. Would there'd ever have been the same degree of states sharing salmonid eggs with each other? For states like Illinois and Indiana, which almost completely rely on salmonid eggs from Michigan and Wisconsin, what would their trout and salmon stocking programs look like? Would there be a lakewide, cooperative data collecting and sharing apparatus? Would there have been effective leveraging of resources to coordinate sampling, data standards, and data analysis between multiple federal agencies and multiple states? Would there be anywhere close to the same current understanding of lakewide ecological issues, statuses, and trends? Would states have successfully managed at cooperating to avoid crashing the system? Without everybody working together, sharing data, and sitting down at the table to manage things together, there'd be a lot more chaos and I am of the opinion that avoiding wide-spread, cataclysmic events would have be much tougher. I don't think anybody would disagree that the lake was close to the brink from 2013-2015. If not for drastic measures brought about by cooperative management I truly believe the lake's forage base would have been irreparably changed. Of course, that's all very speculative, and while it's an interesting thought experiment, I'm hoping at the upcoming meetings we can focus on the future and how best to manage our collective resource moving forward, rather than litigate things that happened decades ago.
