Champs and Chili...
Its tournament time in Michigan City and featured speakers at your April
8 Hoosier Coho Club meeting will be 2014 Classic winners Tony Wiatrowski
(Break Time) and Carter Elenz (Salmon Hawk).
Many Classic partners will also have tables set up to display their wares
and talk fishing tips. Simrad (electronics), ITO Flies (trolling flies and
more), MC Sports (great inventory of spoons and plugs), Morgan Tackle
(copper wire line), Church Tackle (planer boards and trolling aids),
SeaQuest Lures (tournament winning spoons) and more are expected to be on
hand.
April 8 is also Chili Cook-Off night. First place wins $100, second $50
and third, a HCC membership. Entry is free, bring enough for 40 or so
samples and be there early. Admission to judge. sample and vote is $3.
As always, Hoosier Coho Club meetings are open to the public, so bring
some friends.
Rules for the 41st annual Classic (May 2-3), Pro/Am (April 25) and
Hartman Memorial are at
www.hoosiercohoclub.org. The Buffalo Bill
Memorial is April 18 (
www.michianasteelheaders.com) and the Coho Capital
Derby runs April 25 through May 31 (
www.michigancitylaporte.com).
March 11 speaker Matthew Kornis (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service) sent an
e-mail thanking the club for inviting him and saying he was impressed by
the volume of knowledgeable questions asked by the membership.
So far, the primary conclusion of the coded-wire tag study is Chinook
travel a lot. Open water recoveries from sport trollers showed salmon
stocked at every site on lakes Michigan and Huron have been caught at just
about every other site around Lake Michigan. A bit more is covered in
News-Dispatch article and attachments below.
From the Michigan City News-Dispatch;
Those feisty Chinook salmon you caught outside Michigan City last May were
as likely to have been born in a tiny tributary 500 miles away in
Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada as stocked by the Indiana DNR in Trail
Creek.
That is a conclusion I made from a presentation by Matthew Kornis, PhD.
and fish biologist with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, at a Hoosier
Coho Club meeting recently.
Kornis provided a dizzying array of data on a landmark, Chinook
mass-marking study. Since 2012, every Chinook stocked by every agency in
the Great Lakes has received a minuscule wire tag embedded in its snout
identifying when and where it was released.
With one complete life-cycle (Chinook spend 3 years in the open lake) on
record, some interesting information is being accumulated.
Foremost, Chinook love to roam Lake Michigan and Lake Huron and the
straits between the lakes are not much of a barrier. Regardless of origin,
they seem to prefer Michigan, presumably due to fewer alewives (prey fish)
in Huron.
In 2014, Chinook from all Lake Michigan stocking sites were caught at all
other ports on Lake Michigan and a few sites on Huron. Lake Huron stocked
Chinook were caught in greater numbers in Lake Michigan than their
"native" Lake Huron.
Most noteworthy, nearly two-thirds (65.6%) of Chinook caught at Michigan
City in 2014 were unmarked and presumed to be naturally reproduced salmon.
Given the extent "wild" Chinook are produced in Georgian Bay (perhaps as
many as 10 million according to biologists) and the vagabond nature of
Chinook, its likely a percentage of the kings you and I caught here last
summer came from Huron. There is also substantial natural reproduction
occurring in northern Lake Michigan.
Also of note, Wisconsin stocked Chinook were the largest contributor to
the 34 percent of marked salmon captured in Michigan City and other
Indiana ports. Lake wide, Wisconsin hatcheries produced close to 50
percent of the tagged Chinook caught by anglers.
Chinook stocking target rates (since 2013) in Lake Michigan are 734,000
for Wisconsin, 560,000 Michigan, 230,000 Illinois and 200,000 Indiana.
Lake Huron agencies stock around 675,000 Chinook.
At any rate, the marked Chinook program is good science at work. In the
future, with a few more years of data, biologists will have a bundle of
facts to better understand and manage Chinook, particularly the salmon's
predator/prey relationship with alewives.
The Chinook tag study is producing solid detail of the intra and inter
lake movements, contribution to the sport fishery, survival of
pen-released versus hatchery-released and the extent of natural
reproduction on a year-by-year basis.
U.S. Fish & Wildlife staff (remember the ladies at the Washington Park
cleaning station) examined 1,187 Chinook in Indiana last year and 12,447
total between Lake Michigan and Huron.
They also examined thousands of other salmonids. Beside recovering coded
wire tags, fish were measured, sexed, had stomach contents checked and
were examined for lamprey scarring.
A new salmon and lake trout study, Stable Isotope Analysis, was also
launched in 2014. The SIA involves collecting muscle tissue from fish,
which will later be examined to precisely identify what they've eaten in
the previous month, which again, should prove useful in managing the
alewife population and the fish which feed upon them.
