TOPIC:

For some reason I got a newsletter from the IL DNR about biological stuff going on in IL part of Lake Michigan. Most was a rehash of oft-hashed subjects such as low alewife numbers, lake trout info and the like. One stat that sort of slapped me upside the face is about the origin of IL caught kings according to the USFWS head hunters.
61% natural - 22% Wisconsin - 7% Michigan - 4% Lake Huron - 3% each, IL and IN.

Okay some of that is a run the numbers thing. No surprise on naturals. Some surprise about WI and MI but they stock quite a few kings relative to the other states, but Lake Huron beating out both IN and IL? Now that's a head-scratcher.

Another is why IL is so low? One would think home field advantage would spike them up a bit higher in the standings. One would think the proximity of IN would elevate that number as well.

So where are IN's kings showing up? Not in IL, not in IN, not in MI or WI in any big degree that I know of.

I've been to many of the WI ports where kings are stocked - Kenosha, Racine, Sheboygan, Manatowoc, Two Rivers, Sturg. Bay and most of them aren't much unlike Indiana places - especially Michigan City. It's widely accepted Wisconsin had the best king fishing on the lake last year.

It seems to me some of this is smolt survival. A little? A lot? Can't say, but it seems to me in Lake County the fall run is near zero. It used to be as good there as anywhere. Portage and Michigan City are better but still far behind historical norms. Sure the lake is changing but it's changing everywhere.

Except Wisconsin? Hmmmmm. What are they doing the rest of the states aren't.

Lake Huron migrants outnumbering home-grown fish? Preposterous!

Excellent points and questions. LIke you said, this has been going on for quite some time now. I'm not sure if its a sheer numbers
thing (stockings), smolt survival, clear lake, no clue other than what you described. Used to be good action for staging kings in the fall, specifically
michigan city, as I've fished kings there since the early 80's. I'm sure much of it is stocking numbers...we (IN) were probably planting 750,000 back in those times, and now its 50,000 with a 1% return. 500 kings available with 3 stocking sites...good luck hitting one this fall.
At least I was in on the "good ole days", and there was some good times back then!!

Mike,
seems as if the folks that know don't want to say.

All I can add is that improper stocking with no Or very little imprint spells big problems and small returns. Wisconsin understands this and have worked on making things better. Things start with a good imprint the rest builds off of that. There have been many changes since the days when Indiana took care of Indiana, and didn't have themselves tied to others.

It's mostly not what Wisconsin is doing, but what they have, environmentally. And, specifically, only in parts of Wisconsin. From Milwaukee north to Algoma has the highest and most consistent survival in the lake. But Green Bay consistently has some of the worst survival in the lake, which is probably tied to the massive number of walleyes, bass, pike, musky, etc. And far southern Wisconsin also has variable survival.

The reason that central Wisconsin has such excellent survival is that that area has prevailing westerly winds, which cause lots of upwelling, making nutrients available to pelagic zone. This is really important, as the quagga mussels sequester much of the nutrient load on the lake bottom, unless there is upwelling that redistributes it through the water column. They have more rocky substrate, which provides structure, and lots of benthic invertebrates (food). Those same westerly winds that create upwellings also blow a lot of terrestrial insects out in the lake, further subsidizing the food web. All of that combines to offer a lot more food for smolts. More food = better grown and higher survival

Perhaps just as importantly, all those features also attracts baitfish. When there are clouds of baitfish nearshore in May/June, when smolts are most vulnerable to getting eaten by predators, the baitfish act as cover, a predation buffer. When there is no bait nearshore, smolts are much more vulnerable to predation. And then once the smolts are big enough to eat alewives, they have more prey as well.

Following the massive 2010 alewife yearclass, Michigan and Indiana had excellent survival of the 2011 chinook stockings. It's very likely that this was because of the huge numbers of alewife nearshore in early 2011, providing a predation buffer, and then the average size of the 2012 alewife year class provided food for the 1 year old chinooks. But after that, with no good alewife yearclasses in 2013 or 2014, survival plummeted everywhere except where the bulk of the bait was (Wisconsin)

With fewer alewives in the lake, and more patchy distribution, you're starting to see a lot more disparity both in stocking success and fishing success









In terms of the Huron fish getting caught in Lake Michigan, some context helps. Those particular numbers Mike cited (fish recovered by district) are adjusted for angler effort, but not for the number stocked. The Lake Huron stocking is 700K fish. Most of those are stocked just east of the Bridge, about 10 miles from Lake Michigan... 95% of them are recovered in Lake Michigan. There's not much food for them in Huron, so they swim west until they hit baitfish, usually around Manistique or the Door Peninsula. We count them as stocked in Lake Michigan for management purposes - the Predator Prey Ratio and chinook biomass models all count them as Michigan fish.

Illinois has stocked just over 230K on average since 2012, and Indiana 195K. So when you look at the numbers of fish stocked, it's not all that surprising that Lake Huron fish make up about the same amount of the fishery in southern Lake Michigan as IN/IL fish, since there are way more stocked in northern Lake Huron than there are in IN/IL combined.

This has very little to do with imprinting. Imprinting mostly matters in the fish returning at spawning time. Imprinting does not equal "survival to the big lake"

All the data conclusively showing Wisconsin has much greater survival is from the open water fishery in the spring and summer, not staging fish. This is done to get an unbiased look at the contributions of fish, when they are evenly mixed throughout the lake. This totally takes imprinting out of the equation.

Furthermore, survival and fall return has drastically decreased everywhere, even in places using the same stocking location, stocking time, and stocking numbers. At the risk of beating a dead horse, IT'S NOT AN IMPRINTING ISSUE!


By the way, note the consistently poor and mediocre survival on Michigan's coast... that's despite long-term net pen partnerships in many of their stocking areas

And most of the Wisconsin fish were not net penned, the bulk of this data was collected before net pens were used in Wisconsin.

I know it's really tempting to reach for a simple explanation that has some specific person or agency to blame. It'd be fantastic if there was an easy solution of "DNR is incompetent/lazy/conspiring, and all they have to do is do some net pens!" but the reality is that mother nature holds most of the cards, and Wisconsin has the best hand dealt to it by mother nature.

Then Wisconsin going to using even more pens is just wasted time on their part?

If Indiana fish don't need imprinting then why not just dump them into the lake?

Why did Indiana at one point do their stocking much further upstream then what has been the way things were done. Just recently you starting moving fish further upstream. Wasting time? Follow what you have been doing doesn't get different results.
I know that we have other issues going on with the lake that can have a impact.

If imprinting doesn't play that big, then why when the kings were stocked in the port of Indiana, they returned to the port of Indiana?And the majority of the fish were on the east side harbor some in the west.

Ben you and I have argued this point many times over the years. So why not just dump them in the lake and be done with it. There have been many changes in the way fish stocking has gone. We are dependent on others but we have the skams that Indiana put alot of time and money behind and I understand why. Yet when it comes to dealing with the kings they seem to be low on the totem pole. Change to try other stocking is slow. We were told to not worry about stocking reductions as natural kings will still be there and we wouldn't see much of a change. There is a change. There are less kings. We have not seen were the amount of naturals fill the void of what now is missing. Every April, late in the month, kings could be caught west of lake street to Gary Light. Every year it has been fewer and fewer. Not many shaker kings around. We see alot of young coho but where are the young natural kings?Shouldn't they be there as the water warms, like they used to be?

I know it's really tempting to reach for a simple explanation that has some specific person or agency to blame. It'd be fantastic if there was an easy solution of "DNR is incompetent/lazy/conspiring, and all they have to do is do some net pens!" but the reality is that mother nature holds most of the cards, and Wisconsin has the best hand dealt to it by mother nature.

I would not say Mother Nature has the biggest cards or the most in this game at the start or in the end. Nature does find a way and Wisconsin does have the best natural conditions at this point but it was Human interaction that has gotten us to this point. Salmon are not native to the Great lakes, humans put them here not Mother Nature. As well as the path to allow Alewife, Quagga, Zebra, Gobie, and next threat of Asian Carp. We keep messing with the system for the almighty dollar from Steel, Shipping, Power, down to Boat and Tackle sales. If the tourism dollar was small you wouldn't see Wisconsin turning the finger to the other Great lakes states to steal their tourism. Same can be said about the other states trying to save a fishery that started to save the tourism to the fresh water beaches when the dead alewifes were being removed by front end loaders and dump trucks. We have been spoiled, no doubt about that one. Unfortunatley we can see similar declines in other areas of the sporting and commercial worlds from coast to coast. I do think the DNR is doing the best it can with the resources it gets for the most part but stuck in the middle between the right thing and the goverment button pushers. It is really irratating and not just with the fishing industry, when the public speaks at forums, town hall's, or Votes (to a brick wall) and Goverment does whatever it wants anyway for the betterment of its own wallets. We still live in the "LAND of the FREE and Home of the BRAVE", which I gladly fought for, but we are no longer governed by the people for the people. That is where I point my Finger, Oh and Just My Opinion.

I don't know what else to say, Ed. We've argued this point many times. You have strongly held opinions, I have data. What would you do if you were in charge?


We used to stock Trail Creek at Friendship Gardens/Liberty Trail. And even in the Michigan City Harbor. We got excellent returns... mostly because there were a lot more fish being stocked, and there was a lot more bait in the lake.

Now we stock at Meer Road, which is miles upstream of the old stocking location. We made the change during the construction of the Lamprey Barrier, and to put them farther upstream in an area with less fishing pressure as a result of the elimination of the spring fishing closure.

We used to predominately stock chinooks at 149 in the late 80s and early 90s. Now we stock at Mineral Springs Road, a few hundred yards upstream. There was a tiff with the old NPS superintendent, who didn't want a non-native fish stocked in "his" park. Never mind that they had to swim down thru the park anyways, regardless of where they were stocked... but that's a whole different can of worms.

By the way, those are the stocking sites for ALL salmonids, not just chinooks.



I don't think Wisconsin is wasting time with net pens. I'm just stating that they are not a silver bullet.

I also never said imprinting doesn't matter. Please do not twist my words like that. I said that imprinting is a totally separate issue than survival to adult and being caught in the open lake. Imprinting absolutely matters to get the fish back in the fall. Indiana fish imprint just fine being planted 8-10 miles upriver. They take several days to several weeks to outmigrate. More than enough time to imprint.

Harbor stockings in general show less imprinting and return than stream stockings. But it varies from harbor to harbor (again, due to environmental conditions) But they still imprint to harbors just fine.

If we had an imprinting issue in Indiana, you would see them turn up in the river catches of other states, and at other weirs. There have been 12,119 chinooks sampled from weirs around the lake in the last 4 years. Of those 12K fish, there have been 193 chinooks stocked in Trail Creek recovered at weirs. 189 of those were in the Trail Creek Lamprey Barrier. 4 were in the Root River. If there was an imprinting issue, you'd see those fish turning up everywhere.

Furthermore, every single fish we've sampled out of the Little Cal has been from a Little Cal stocking, and only 2 out of the 200+ fish we've sampled from the Trail Creek Lamprey Barrier was from the Little Cal. Again - if we had an imprinting issue, we wouldn't see that.


With regards to Wisconsin stocking practices: many of their tributaries are short. They don't stock very far from the lake.

Strawberry Creek Weir: it's stocked less than 1/2 a mile from the lake.

In the WM4 and WM5 zone, which has the best survival anywhere in the lake:

Kewaunee R stocking is 10 miles upstream from the lake

Ahnapee River (Algoma) is 3.5 miles upstream from the lake

Manitowoc River is 2.5 miles from the lake

East Twin River, 10 miles from the lake
West Twin River, 14 miles from the lake

Port Washington, harbor stocking (0 miles from the lake)

Milwaukee, harbor stocking (0 miles from the lake)

Sheboygan River, 7 miles from the lake


Those are very comparable to the stocking distance upstream in Indiana. Again, it's not the imprinting. They are imprinting just fine. It's the survival once they exit the tributaries. If they don't have food, or a predation buffer, they don't survive well.

Seems as if more fish run the west branch then the east and I don't think you have ever stocked the west branch. But I guess this is just a werd situation?

I think that is a natural reaction Ed, or at least nature doing its thing. In Michigan the Betsie river has a natural run of Kings and as far as I know there has never been a stocking plan or release for that river. I have fished there since the beginning of the 70's.