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Message Subject: Sag Bay Walleye/Perch Overview Meeting.

walleye express

Posted 1/30/2015 3:38 PM (#112856)
Subject: Sag Bay Walleye/Perch Overview Meeting.

Member

Posts: 2680

Location: Essexville, MI./Saginaw Bay.

Dan:

The Citizen Advisor’s meeting went well. I made two presentations one each for walleye and perch. These were building on our past discussions of the need for action to try and turn around the perch declines in Saginaw Bay. I showed a number of graphs that frame or characterize the current (depressed) status of yellow perch population and fisheries in the bay. I went on to explain and document our best understanding of what forces are causing the declines in perch. The slides are too numerous and complex to lay out here in an e-mail but in a nut shell it’s like this; Yellow perch are reproducing very well in the bay (ever since alewives declined in Lake Huron). Each fall, in our trawling, we see enormous numbers of young-of-the-year (YOY, also known as age-0) yellow perch, but the next year we don’t see the same year class as yearlings (age-1s). So our YOY perch are not surviving to age-1s and this mortality is all playing out before these perch can ‘recruit’ to our fisheries (so anglers and commercial fishers never see them before they are gone at age-1). We believe that the main cause of this is predation. Presently Saginaw Bay is predator heavy and prey light. The principal predator being walleye but other predators too are preying upon young perch including northern pike, whitebass, cormorants, catfish, others too. So we spent time discussing possible management actions to bolster young perch survival. Generally the group agreed that any management action needed to address the root cause of the problem, meaning that we want actions that will promote the survival of juvenile perch. As such, not much hope was pinned to traditional management actions such as length limits, seasons, or bag limit changes for perch as none of those really address juvenile perch survival. Before I continue about perch, let me remark about walleye:

For the walleye presentation, I spoke about the current status of walleye in the bay and Lake Huron. As you know we hit our recovery targets for walleye in 2009. Like perch, walleye are reproducing like crazy since 2003 (when alewives disappeared). We stopped stocking walleye in 2006. Unlike perch, however, our juvenile walleye are surviving very well and we see regular very strong year classes of walleye. This has fueled our tremendous walleye fishery in the bay (and beyond in much of Lake Huron). However, as abundance of walleye has increased, their growth rates have (predictably) declined. Compounding matters, our indices of available prey fish in the bay (from our trawl data series) indicates that our prey fish abundance is at near record lows, indicating to us that the forage fish community is being heavily predated. So perch aside, we believe we see evidence that our walleye population can sustain considerably more harvest. My computer simulation modeling suggests that we could harvest up to 50% more than current levels and still stay within the limits of sustainability. Other metrics such as exploitation rate (the percent of adult walleyes being harvested) and total mortality rate (percent dying or being harvested by all sources each year) both also suggested that we have a capacity for more walleye harvest.

So both the perch and walleye issues both point to the need and opportunity for more walleye harvest. From a perch perspective, more walleye harvest will hopefully help reduce (some) of the juvenile perch predation. More walleye harvest will also address concerns over the overall bay forage fish population, growth rates, etc. not to mention just to make sure we are making full use of the walleye available for harvest (not under-utilizing). Now having said that, I should point out that we don’t think increasing walleye harvest will (alone) turn around the perch issue. Likely other management action will be needed to fully resolve the perch survival issue. But most of the conversation at the meeting was about what might be done to increase walleye harvest. That was about where the time ran out but we got far enough into it to talk generically about some options. We drew some on the Lake Erie experience where they have (in some years) liberalized their harvest to take more full advantage of increased abundance. There that has usually been in the form of liberalized daily bag limits. They have had limits as great as 10 fish per day. They have also lowered the minimum length limit to as low as 13 inches in some years. We discussed the possibility of some of those ideas for Saginaw Bay. We also discussed the question as to whether opening the Saginaw River year round (Just the Saginaw River itself, not the three main tributaries such as Tittabawassee, Shiawassee &/or Cass Rivers). Like I said, this was an informational meeting only, not a decision meeting. The group chewed over the pros and cons of these sort of options briefly but nothing was settled upon.

From here on out, The DNR will be further reviewing the data, doing some more analysis, and moving towards a more specific suite of walleye management options (changes). The next likely step will be to take those focused set of options back to the Lake Huron Citizen’s Fishery Advisory Committee at their April meeting. Simultaneous to that, those same options, coupled with informational presentations will be presented at the annual MI Sea Grant spring fisheries workshops. Those are organized by Sea Grant and we do much of the presenting at those. The exact dates and locations are being settled on right now and will be announced shortly but at least one of them will be in the Bay City area. They will mostly all be sometime the last two weeks of April. These, of course, are open to the public, free and a great opportunity to see the information first hand and give feedback. During that time (from April to June) we’ll also gratefully accept any written comments that anyone cares to share. The DNR will then (based on input and staff analysis) formulate a proposed “Fisheries Order” and submit it to our Regulations Committee (by June). We’ll continue to take input from June to September and then the final proposed regulation changes will go before the Natural Resources Commission at their September meeting for action (adoption, rejection, or change). The public can also comment directly to the NRC prior to, or at their meeting but I encourage people with opinions not to wait until then or to comment both beforehand and then again to the NRC. Fisheries Orders usually get ‘finalized’ (formal language written) by October / November and then implemented the following April 1. So the changes we are beginning to discuss would go into effect April 1, 2016. There may be other additional forms of information and options for commenting. We may develop a walleye management webpage for example, I’m not sure what all but the goal will be to ensure everyone gets the information and a chance to comment. So in summary, the main comment period will be from this coming mid-April through September.

The next best chance to get up to speed on all this will be the Sea Grant Fisheries workshops in April. I’ll pass along the time and place details about those as they become available.

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