TOPIC:

Hey guys I know a lot of small kings were caught at our tournament on saturday. Please throw them up on the poll. Thank you.

Now that the field season has mostly wrapped up, here is an update with the preliminary numbers from the Indiana-based headhunters. These are pending final data quality checks and corrections, but I don't expect things to change much.

69.7% wild from chinooks sampled from East Chicago to South Haven over the entire season.

16.8% wild lake trout (majority sampled from Michigan City) but also sampled from EC to SH


Both of those numbers are fairly close to what we saw last year for both species

Thanks for the information Ben, Jay Wesley recently mentioned though, that lakers were actually up to 48% natural EC and west.

Well I had a whole post written up and then the browser crashed. Ugh.

I'll write a shorter version of it.

Yes, the Illinois area in particular is a hotspot for wild lake trout reproduction. In particular, Julian's Reef. The reef complexes over there are the main source population for wild lake trout in the entire southern basin.

I have the data from the headhunters from all states combined from 2012-2015. The table below is the proportion of wild fish sampled by headhunters over the entirety of those 4 years. I have not adjusted it for angler effort or anything else, so this is not a very advanced analysis or anything. Keep in mind that some statistical districts have low sample sizes. But you can see the clear pattern that Illinois is the hot spot, and as you go north into Wisconsin, the proportion of wild fish drops off dramatically. Same thing as you go north into Michigan. Again, this is not adjusting for angler effort, and obviously sample weighting has a large effect so you wouldn't want to scale up any single stat district to make a generalization about the lake or southern basin as a whole just based on this table, other than that the proportion of wild lake trout in general is probably between 15 and 25% basin wide