TOPIC:

Like I said above, at length, there's no estimate on smolt predation available. You can measure the return as adults to get at the question of survival to adulthood.

We also do not have a significant bird predation issue that can be solved by net pens since we don't do harbor stockings. Instead of repeating myself, please see my posts earlier in the thread. I don't want to sound like a broken record. All I can say is that if we thought net pens would increase our returns we would do them. There's no grand conspiracy to tank chinook fishing in Indiana.

Cormorants indeed can eat a lot of fish.... I don't need to google it because I have bioenergetic and field diet studies done right here in Lake Michigan. I also have a diet study spanning 2 years at the East Chicago cormorant colony, which found not a single salmonid eaten, or even any salmon DNA or a single coded wire tag in cormorant pellets. They are eating almost entirely alewife, gobies, and perch. Yes, we would like to see them reduced significantly. That's a whole other topic...

Ben, thanks for all the feedback. I have one more question that’s tangentially related to this thread. I keep reading that a significant portion of the wild kings are coming over from Huron Tribs in Canada. Do you have any information on what tribs are kicking out the fish? Is there a Canadian Little Man or P.M. that I could go fish that’s pumping out big numbers of fish?

Didn't mean for you, Ben, to google info on the commorants that was for others that may have not known how much they eat. I understand that they are protected but it doesn't change the fact that they are one of the predators.

But if it isn't birds that are predating on smolts then what is the reason our kings are not making it?.All fish look very healthy along with the kings. There seems to be plenty to eat. The coho we had were stuffed constantly. Kings along the lake all looked very good so why is it just us that is seeming to have a problem with kings. No conspiracy just asking as others cause we want to see what the problems are and maybe a change direction that can be taken. If your offended by the question I'm asking and others sorry but there seems to be an issue that hangs around Indiana kings. Bait has been ticking up with the lake level going up. Seems to be a direct correlation between the two.If bait continues a good trend and we stock more kings in the future then how do we fix what is broke by then to help us all see a better fishery?
Jay Wesley told me to my face that our smolts were seeing a 40% predation rate.. If Jay is correct then 40% of 63,000 leaves ??? 37,800 add in a 2% return rate = 756 kings

To change the direction of the thread a little. It seems the “chinook equivalents” is an attempt to allocate the numbers and species each state can stock by the projected number of alewives those fish will eat during their lifespan. Interesting concept.

However, when it comes to chinook stocking all of them are treated equally. The assumption is made that 10,000 baby kings stocked in East Chicago will eat as many alewifes as 10,000 baby kings stocked at Trail Creek, 10K stocked at the Root River in Wisconsin or as 10,000 naturally produced kings from the Pere Marquette in Michigan.

This is a false assumption. Due to environmental issues 10K kings at East Chicago may result in only 100 fish actually swimming around the lake eating alewives. Perhaps 10K stocked in Trail Creek results in 200 fish living and feeding in the lake while there may be 2000 kings in the lake from the PM wild stocks.

What is needed is chinook “survival - equivalents” to guide the stocking. It seems the goal of the Lake Committee is to apportion the number of kings (and other species) from each state contributing to the predator load on the whole lake equitably. With the coded tag results and creel counts it would seem possible to pretty well document several years of data to figure out the percentage of from each stocking site that actually live and become alewife eaters.

So instead of using a lakewide, one size fits all percentage of surviving baby kings and allow Indiana to only stock 60 or 70 thousand, Illinois to stock 160K and so on, using the "survival equivalents," each state would be allowed to produce their fair share of living, feeding kings.

So let’s say this is done and Indiana is given a quota of say 6,000 or 9,000 surviving kings to populate the lake each year. (Just picking a number.) Using creel, wire tag and other data, Indiana might need to stock 60K or perhaps 150K. The stocked numbers doesn't matter, just the projected survivor numbers.

Take it one step farther. Let’s say the Indiana DNR decides to shoot for an equal number of fish returning to each county (two or three thousand, using my made up numbers). Then, using our creel and wire tag data, it’s determined the stocking at the Lake County site or sites needs to be X thousand, the stocking at Portage needs to be Y thousand and the stocking at Trail Creek needs to be Z thousand. X may be twice the number as Z but remember the goal is not to be equitable in the number stocked at a site, but equitable in the number surviving, contributing the the fishery and returning to their stocking sites.

Mike, funny you should mention that - Brian and I have kicked over very similar ideas during office brainstorming sessions

Ultimately we concluded that while it's a great idea, and would be ideal IF it could be implemented, there's a lot of issues with the concept that make it unworkable

Primary reason being that you can't measure survival to adulthood until after the fact, so you're always going to be 4+ years behind the curve in terms of knowing the actual survival. And that's assuming the fish are all coded wire tagged. Kings are no longer coded wire tagged, so that option pretty much shoots it down going forward on it's own

There's also an assumption of precision here that unfortunately isn't correct. We simply don't have the ability/resources to precisely measure survival rates from dozens and dozens of stocking locations every year around the lake in perpetuity. Creel surveys aren't conducted for every tributary and port, and especially now going forward without coded wire tags, it'll be impossible to assess survival by stocking site in the future.

Even assuming you could measure precisely, the rates still do bounce around from year to year, even in the same stocking location. How do you settle on which rate? An average over time? What time frame? How often is it updated? There's significant downsides and risk to the forage base if rates were set low, stocking adjusted upward to compensate, and then there was above-average survival

Finally, it's hard enough to get all the tribes and states to come to consensus on current stocking quotas, it would be damn near impossible to get consensus once you throw time-and-space varying survival rates in there and start breaking it down on such a fine scale. And if you do it for chinooks, why not for every other species too? It's a big rabbit hole and the politics would just be untenable and nothing would ever move forward

Finally, it's all kind of baked into the cake already in each state, since as long as you are below your equivalent cap, you can stock whatever mix of salmonids you want. I know it's not ideal, but it's the best we got


Ed - your math is about right and illustrates that very few kings come back. Even if you say that predation kills 40% of smolts before they even have a chance to even do anything, if by some miracle you could cut predation in half, using your hypothetical, you're only increasing from 756 kings to 1008 kings.

The biggest reason for reduced king survival out in the lake is that alewife populations and recruitment are down. That can be kind of counterintuitive when you see how fat and healthy the adult kings are. But the bottleneck is coming before they survive to adulthood. Young kings need young alewife to survive and grow. We have seen very boom or bust alewife recruitment the past 5-10 years. If it's a bust year for alewife spawning, that contemporary yearclass of kings is going to have a hard time. But for the few that survive to be 1 year, 2 year, or 3 year old kings, they can find adult alewife and feed on them in the following years, and face less competition for them, since there are fewer adult kings in their yearclass to compete for food. There's been an uptick in bait, because we reduced salmonid biomass significantly thru the stocking cut. But we continue to see very erratic alewife recruitment

The other aspect is that we see huge regional disparities in alewife concentrations - if we don't have alewife spawning down here, the kings stocked down here are at an initial disadvantage. 15 years ago and prior, there were alewife everywhere, and there was a great offshore plankton bloom. Now, in the post-quagga invasion, we don't have that. Now, alewife are concentrating where the food is in spring - primarily near large tributaries and near areas where there is frequent upwelling. We have neither of those.


Another issue that deserves further study is the invertebrate communities of the lake, plus terrestrial insects. Baby salmonids eat a lot of bugs when they are first outmigrating. There has been some emerging worldwide research indicating that terrestrial bugs, and in some areas aquatic bugs, are down considerably compared to 30, 40, 50 years ago. Likely a result of all the pesticides we put out there on crops, lawns, etc. But maybe from other areas. That could be having a significant effect both within tributaries and out in the lake itself


Southshore (John?) that is a good question regarding which Canadian tribs would be best to fish. To my very limited knowledge, a lot of those streams have little easy access. I believe there is a pilot project going on to use otolith microchemistry to get at estimates of smolt production out of canadian streams. There has been some limited work done on it in years past. I would start scrutinizing this thesis for clues. ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refere...cle=6098&context=etd

Pages 107-110 would be the place to start.

A good person to ask about this would be Dave Gonder. I met him at a meeting about 5 years ago. I don't know if he still works for Ontario MNR, but he is(was?) a longtime biologist up there and owns his own rod building company and does a lot of fishing. I believe this is his email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. If not here's his website www.mykiss.ca/contact.html

Ed - your math is about right and illustrates that very few kings come back. Even if you say that predation kills 40% of smolts before they even have a chance to even do anything, if by some miracle you could cut predation in half, using your hypothetical, you're only increasing from 756 kings to 1008 kings.

The biggest reason for reduced king survival out in the lake is that alewife populations and recruitment are down. That can be kind of counterintuitive when you see how fat and healthy the adult kings are. But the bottleneck is coming before they survive to adulthood. Young kings need young alewife to survive and grow. We have seen very boom or bust alewife recruitment the past 5-10 years. If it's a bust year for alewife spawning, that contemporary yearclass of kings is going to have a hard time. But for the few that survive to be 1 year, 2 year, or 3 year old kings, they can find adult alewife and feed on them in the following years, and face less competition for them, since there are fewer adult kings in their yearclass to compete for food. There's been an uptick in bait, because we reduced salmonid biomass significantly thru the stocking cut. But we continue to see very erratic alewife recruitment
A few years back, maybe when water was lower, seemed as if caloric value of Alewife was being measured. Is caloric value still measured and has there been a increase or decrease to the caloric value of Alewife.
If Ales are still finding it hard to make multi year groups, will that same logic be used if the feds want to stock cisco again at a later date?