Plan to revive muskie stock in Great Lakes returns

Topics concerning muskellunge and fisheries research, diseases, stocking and management.
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Hamilton Reef
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Plan to revive muskie stock in Great Lakes returns

Post by Hamilton Reef » Sun Feb 06, 2011 9:54 am

Plan to revive muskie stock in Great Lakes returns

http://www.mlive.com/outdoors/index.ssf ... ck_in.html 02/06/11 By Victor Skinner | The Grand Rapids Press

LANSING -- A plan to revive Great Lakes muskie populations throughout the state will begin this year following a series of delays because of fish health issues at state hatcheries.

Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment officials plan to collect native Great Lakes muskie eggs from Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River in coming months.

They hope to rear as many as 20,000 of the fish this year, said Jim Dexter, DNRE Lake Michigan basin coordinator.

“Lake St. Clair is the only place where the population is large enough to … start a broodstock,” said Dexter, adding the Great Lakes muskie program has been in the works for roughly a decade. “We’ve been getting close for a number of years to starting this program up ... but health issues have gotten in the way.”

A variety of fish diseases, most recently viral hemorrhagic septicemia (VHS), halted plans to raise Great Lakes muskie at the state’s Wolf Lake fish hatchery. Dexter said new techniques for sanitizing eggs have eliminated the concern about VHS.

“If we’re successful in getting eggs and we’re successful in rearing … we would expect to have our first stockings this October,” Dexter said.

Fall fingerlings will be planted in Thornapple Lake in Barry County and Otsego County’s Big Bear Lake to be used as broodstock. The DNRE hopes to raise 20,000 each year so they can be stocked throughout the state, including the Upper Peninsula, Dexter said.

The DNR stocks as many as 40,000 northern muskie each year in inland lakes where the fish do not reproduce well, said Matt Hughes, DNRE fisheries biologist who oversees fish rearing at the Wolf Lake hatchery.

Those fish typically are not stocked in waters that connect to the Great Lakes to prevent cross breeding and genetic contaminating small native populations of spotted muskie that inhabit those waters, he said.

The main advantage of stocking the native Great Lakes muskie is “they are indigenous to Michigan, so we could pretty much stock them in any waters we see fit,” Hughes said.

The state also has stocked tiger muskie in the past, but that program ended in the early 1990s because of the high cost of hatchery renovations necessary to rear the fish, Hughes said.

The state will continue to stock northern muskie at about half of current levels when the Great Lakes muskie strain is introduced this year and next, he said.

The bulk of spotted muskie plants will head to broodstock lakes this year, but the next priority will be to supplement natural populations that are struggling to reproduce in areas such as the Antrim chain lakes, Indian River and other waters, officials said.

Michigan Muskie Alliance President Will Schultz said he’s excited the program finally is becoming reality because he believes it has the potential to significantly boost the quality of muskie fishing throughout the state.

“What we have currently are a lot of good ... inland lakes, but they are almost entirely maintained by stocking” northerns, Schultz said. “They are not ever going to self-sustain.”

DNRE fisheries officials said the ultimate goal is to revive native muskie populations in drowned-river mouths and other areas where their habitat has been destroyed by development. That would be a good thing for West Michigan fishermen, Shultz said.

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