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Brood stock team shoots for their collection needs,,,,,700 total, 450 females and 250 males. Last year they came in alittle early but strong. When they hit their number they are done. This year it was drawn out, a few here a few there and they were worried that they might not be able to make their hit number. They finally did. So it is becoming an issue that is being watched with a little worry behind it. So because that one item Mother Nature, every thing is at her mercy. Lake wide all states seem to argue on stocking numbers. What if the magic is actually in the focus of Lake wide bait? After all we can't have additons to stocking without the bait to support it. And, when bait shrinks stocking cuts kick in and the Indiana fishery suffered more then the others. Up north as their stocked fish start to return they are still catching some naturals in those numbers. Those naturals that we may have had for a while left this area a long time ago. All our returns are stocked fish.
Our magic can't happen with out the bait that is needed here. 

Well root cause for our problem is 2 fold.

Biggest being Quagga mussels and 2nd biggest being 25 years of EPA cleaning up the drainage water which in turn gives the lake less nutrients.

That is how we for sure save the fishery. Until then we have to adept to what we have and not focus on what it used to be like 30 years ago.

Sorry I wasn't able to make the stakeholder's meeting. By the time the date was arranged, I'd made irreversible plans. 
Good discussions here about kings and steelhead. I get the feeling that many look at cohos as though they are something that will always be here in Indiana, regardless of what Indiana does. 

Remember, Michigan stocks the lion's share of the lake's coho. Some years half of them.  Michigan's funding is in trouble and their coho program could be impacted. Relying on another state is imprudent. 

 

Good Morning Mike,

you did miss a good one. I took some liberties hope you don't mind. During the discussion on steelhead and stageing I mentioned that if Brother Nature was here we might be hearing a story of how the Steelhead might move in and out if conditions aren't right. I will always remember the picture and story behind it. the picture you took of a Steely with a gold aberdeen hook with a portion of leader line attached to it. I believe you were out in around 110ft. out of Portage. When one of our folks on this site saw your picture he mentioned that might have been one of his fish. A guy that was dunking shrimp outside of the ditch mouth. He said he was cutting the line instead of netting his fish. So a fish caught at the mouth of the ditch later gets caught out in 110ft just a few weeks apart in time. If I remember correctly water at the ditch was low and very warm that year.

The feds would never admit the "cleaning up of drainage water" but it has clearly been a major factor of less nutrients along with the mussels.. I agree, Tim.

And thanks, Ed, for organizing the meetings.. Glad I could attend. 

LWL wrote:

The feds would never admit the "cleaning up of drainage water" but it has clearly been a major factor of less nutrients along with the mussels.. I agree, Tim.

And thanks, Ed, for organizing the meetings.. Glad I could attend. 

On the contrary, feds (and any  management agency really) tend to shout from the rooftops when they achieve their stated management goal. Anglers just usually aren't interacting with EPA or NOAA folks, who are doing most of this work. And most of the changes happened a long long time ago

Mass nutient balance studies and water quality monitoring have showed a reduction in phosphorus loading of Lake Michigan. Perhaps between 30-50% compared to pre-CWA, but loading bounces around year-to-year. Although Green Bay still struggles with way too much loading, and has anoxic areas (dead zones) due to too much nutrient loading by the Fox River. Most of the reduction in nutrient loading happened in the early 1980s, and reductions have tailed off since then. 

See: 

stateofgreatlakes.net/wp-content/uploads...rReport_SOGL2022.pdf

And a bunch of other papers have been written on it, mostly by feds (NOAA, EPA, USGS) that do this sort of work. 


The reason most lake managers don't spend time talking  about it anymore is because it's old news and not really relevant to current management - not going to change the Clean Water Act and start pumping more phosphates into the water. And the biggest reason is that the real hammer to offshore phosphorous levels (and fish production) happened decades after the bulk of phosphorous loading changes happened, which was a result of zebra and quagga mussels sequestering nutrients on the bottom and rendering them unavailable to the rest of the food web. Due to within-lake changes of nutrient cycling , disrupted by mussels

See: 
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0380133010000535
"In this paper, we use these long-term datasets to explore temporal and spatial trends in TP, chlorophyll a, soluble silica (Si), and nitrate plus nitrite (hereafter nitrate), as well as recently updated estimates of TP loads. We compare changes in nutrient concentrations between 1983-1999 (pre-quagga influence) and 2000-2008 (post-quagga), as well as between the two agencies. We show significant declines in productivity in the last decade, and suggest these changes are largely attributable to dreissenid mussel filtering."

www.glfc.org/pubs/misc/2018-01.pdf

Especially page 5
"Offshore TP concentrations in spring, monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Great Lakes National Program Office at 16 stations since 1983, have decreased by more than 50% between 1996 (5.84 µg/L) and 2015 (2.81 µg/L; Fig. 2). Chapra and Dolan (2012) and R.P. Barbiero (unpublished data) have developed models to estimate offshore TP concentrations that should have been realized based on TP loadings, retention time, and settling coefficients (i.e., ignoring within-lake TP cycling processes). The results predicted that TP concentrations would undergo steep declines between 1978 and the 1990s but would be relatively unchanged between 1998 and 2011 (Appendix A, Fig. A1). These models suggest that within-lake TP cycling, perhaps caused by sequestration of TP by dreissenids, can explain the continued decline in offshore TP concentrations since the 1990s"



Anyways, not a shot at you Bryan, just get kind of irked when people intimate agencies are covering up their own success stories. Sort of like when people accuse DNR of clandestinely stocking cougars or rattlesnakes and then covering up. Like... are you kidding me? We shout about the success stories when reintroducing animals haha. 

Anyways, Because the Clean Water Act is a major success, and the feds have written quite a bit about it. It's just not the main story with regards to fish production and lower trophic levels - the mussels are. 

In any case, both things are not something fish managers can control at the present, so we have to manage for what is within our control (not much compared to mother nature, unfortunately). 





 

Ben, I have read thru the material you posted. The articles mention load differnces between the inshore, offshore. and the southend. I may have missed it but if the lake load is lower, and biologist see a difference that can be measured. Would I be misled to believe that the southend may be  as much as 50% lower then the lake average which is lower on its own? If some of this is true could it be listed as a strong stressor on bait production? Could we be lead to believe that might be what is holding back some of the bait production on the southend compared to the rest of the lake?  

Another item mentioned in the Stakeholders fall meeting was the Coho that were stocked in the St. Joe has now been moved. Portage amd Michigan City is were those fish were moved to. As metioned before Ben has been doing things that sometimes goes unnoticed. The Joe at one time received some great returns on Coho, but has not been showing well for many years after that. Warm water and predation had to be considered in order to make that move.

Lickety-Split wrote:

Ben, I have read thru the material you posted. The articles mention load differnces between the inshore, offshore. and the southend. I may have missed it but if the lake load is lower, and biologist see a difference that can be measured. Would I be misled to believe that the southend may be  as much as 50% lower then the lake average which is lower on its own? If some of this is true could it be listed as a strong stressor on bait production? Could we be lead to believe that might be what is holding back some of the bait production on the southend compared to the rest of the lake?  

Cannot say with data specifics or confidence because these papers definition of "southern lake michigan" is probably not what we in Indiana consider "the south end" - the furthest south EPA and NOAA survey stations are around South Haven, and I don't believe there are any within Illinois or Indiana waters. Most of those southern stations are between Holland and Muskegon on the Michigan side, out to the middle of the lake south of Milwaukee. And one of the reasons they're there is because of field lab proximity and also because the Grand and Muskegon Rivers are two of the biggest inputs of nutrients to the lake, so it makes sense to measure there.

I would hazard a guess though that the very far south end of the lake is in a comparatively worse spot than many other areas of the lake because we do not have major tributaries feeding in, and a larger proportion of shallow water. The higher nearshore nutrient levels are mostly a product of Michigan tributary inputs (St. Joe River, Grand River, Kalamazoo River, Muskegon River primarily) or the Milwaukee and Sheboygan to a lesser extent in Wisconsin, although they are less than half the flow of those other tribs. And basically all of the very far southern waters are shallow, so were saturated with quagga mussels sooner than the deeper offshore waters in much of the rest of the lake. And the "nearshore shunt" of nutrients is the mussels sequestering nutrients in the bottom, leaving them unavailable to the open water ("pelagic") food web of plankton-alewife-salmon

Having tiny tributaries in Indiana, and zero in Illinois, is going to necessarily limit nearshore nutrient input to the very far south end. Most of the nutrients available to the food web would be from within-lake energy pathways, which the mussels disrupted significantly by siphoning nutrients out of the water and concentrating them on the bottom. So what you're describing is a decent enough theory but I don't believe there are long term data sets to really test it out, given that the long-term monitoring stations are farther north of us. 

 

Interesting discussion.  More going on than a casual fisherman like me generally considers.  Thanks for the insight. 
Ed