Salmon Fishery On The Ropes

[alfredo]

Great read on the state of the Lake Huron & Georgian Bay Salmon Fishery:

There's a decision looming for Lake Huron that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. The state must decide whether it should keep putting chinook salmon in the lake. The fish has been the driving force behind sport fishing in the Great Lakes since it was introduced. But the salmon's future in the Upper Lakes is now questionable.

It's hard to overstate how drastically Pacific salmon transformed the Great Lakes after they were introduced more than 40 years ago. Ed Retherford is a charter boat captain on Lake Huron. He says in the old days on a weekend in Rockport he'd see cars with boat trailers backed up for a mile or two waiting to launch. But now he seldom sees more than twenty boats."

"It just decimated that area," says Retherford. "You can imagine the economics of that."

Chinook or king salmon disappeared from Lake Huron about seven years ago. Most of the charter boats are gone because the kinds of fish that remain are just not as exciting to catch as salmon. State officials figure little towns like Rockport lose upwards of a million dollars in tourism business every year without them.

Food Web Chaos
The salmon's demise followed the disappearance of its favorite food, little fish called alewives. Scientists say there were too many salmon eating the alewives and problems lower down on the food chain caused by invasive mussels. State fisheries biologist Jim Johnson says salmon would rather starve than eat something besides an alewife and they all died of malnutrition.

The changes in Lake Huron since have been significant. Neither salmon nor alewives are native to the lake and with them out of the way native fish like walleye have come back. The state continues to stock one and a half million chinook salmon in Lake Huron every year, but Jim Johnson says the walleye eat most of them. He says Lake Huron can't support a big salmon fishery anymore.

"There's nothing the DNR can do to change that," says Johnson.

The question now is whether to stock any chinook salmon in Huron at all. Giving up on the most popular sport fish in the Great Lakes is hard to swallow but most people see the writing on the wall. So even if stocking continues, it will likely be a fraction of what it once was.

[gofishing]

Interesting reading. Here are some pics of Lake Huron salmon suffering from malnutrition.

[backwoodsmanbob]

I have to wonder what the rainbow stocking is like and are they also going to be cut down.