Here goes my annual Sad Sally routine…never ceases to amaze me how they tend to kill so many of the little buggers at Wolf Lake. What a crappy year…again!

Raising muskies can be tricky

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10/18/09 BY ERIC SHARP FREE PRESS OUTDOORS WRITER 313-222-2511 or ** you do not have permission to see this link **.

GRAYLING — For reasons tough to fathom, the baby muskellunge that hatched at the state's Wolf Lake fish hatchery this spring wouldn't eat artificial food. They either starved to death or turned cannibal.

"You wouldn't believe what a 3-inch muskie can choke down," said Matthew Hughes, a Department of Natural Resources employee who runs the Wolf Lake facility. "They're like snakes. And they're real cannibals. You'd sometimes find a 3-incher with half of another 3-incher sticking out of its mouth."

Despite their size and power as adults, muskellunge can be tough to rear as juveniles, with results fluctuating wildly over the years. Wolf Lake hatched 475,000 fry of the northern muskellunge subspecies last spring, but only about 360 lived to reach the 10-to-11-inch size at which they are stocked into lakes.

Another 3,500 fish the DNR received from Iowa also made it to that size. But the original shipment had 30,000 fingerlings 2 1/2- to 3-inches long, and most died of a disease that manifested itself a couple of days after they arrived at Wolf Lake.

Hughes said that between the problems of food and disease, the DNR was able to stock only about 3,800 northern muskellunge in inland lakes this year, compared with 40,000 that were turned loose last fall.

"This year, the little muskellunge that we hatched just wouldn't convert to artificial food," Hughes said. "We start them out on live brine shrimp and introduce very small artificial food, almost like dust, but they just wouldn't eat it. They either starved or ate each other. The ones that survived were the cannibals."

The Iowa fish apparently arrived with the disease already in them, he said. "Between the 14-hour ride in a truck and the different water at our hatchery, it was able to spread very quickly and killed most of them," he said.

Muskies spawn in the weeds shortly after the ice melts in water less than 2-feet deep at a water temperature of about 50 degrees. Hughes said the DNR sees little natural spawning in inland lakes, probably because human development has eliminated most of the undisturbed shorelines, vegetation and underwater woody debris they require.

Many inland lakes also contain large numbers of northern pike, which hatch a few weeks before the muskellunge, and muskellunge fry are perfect prey for fingerling pike.

Great Lakes muskellunge, the subspecies most common in Lake St. Clair and in the Great Lakes, are reproducing well naturally. Hughes said he suspects muskies that live in the Great Lakes mostly spawn in rivers and drowned river mouths like Portage, Manistee and Muskegon lakes.

Although muskellunge can reach very large sizes (a state record Great Lakes subspecies of 50 pounds, 8 ounces was caught recently), they grow slowly. In northern states and Canada, it takes about 10 years to reach Michigan's legal minimum catch-and-keep size of 42 inches, at which size the fish are 18-20 pounds.

Some 2,000 of the 2009 northern muskie year class were stocked in Lake Margrethe near Grayling, the fourth strong stock of that lake since 2002. The others went to Lake Diane (570), Smallwood Lake (450), Long Lake (375) and Budd Lake (350).

"The fish we stocked in lakes in 2002 should be getting up around 40 inches," Hughes said, 2 inches below the legal minimum to keep muskellunge. "I think they're doing pretty well, because the muskellunge on a lot of these lakes don't get much fishing pressure.

"Once they reach that 10- to 12-inch size, muskellunge don't have a lot of predators, although pike, big bass and other muskellunge will eat them."

Dennis Mullka trucked 2,000 of the 10-inch muskellunge ("I counted every one by hand," he said) from the Wolf Lake Hatchery near Kalamazoo to Lake Margrethe near Grayling in a DNR fish tanker.

After taking the lake's water temperature to ensure the fish wouldn't suffer thermal shock, he hooked big pipes and hoses to the tanker and let the fish flow into the shallows adjacent to M-72.

The little fish quickly pushed off into deeper water, and within a couple of minutes of being released, all 2,000 had swum out of sight with no apparent casualties.

Hey just curious, which long lake where these stocked in?

Please tell me Grand Traverse County.

Yup just as I suspected. I remember reading something along the same lines on the Michigan Sportsman forum.

"don't want the muskies to eat all of our walleyes"

Come on, people are so ignorant. I have friends that live on the lake and when I brought up muskies I got nothing but negativity. Fools.

I wish it was Long lake in Traverse county, very nice lake but very clear water, full of smallies and eyes.