Salmon stocks to be scaled way down

The salmon are eating themselves out of house and home.
By ERIC SHARP
DETROIT FREE PRESS
KENOSHA, Wis. -- Lake Michigan doesn't have enough food to feed all its fish, so biologists want to reduce the number of stocked salmon.
But an angler from Illinois wanted to know why every state with a Lake Michigan shoreline should cut salmon stocking by 25 percent if the main problem comes from fish that naturally reproduce in Michigan rivers.
"Why doesn't Michigan cut its stocking completely?" asked Bill Kaiser of Gurnee Mills, Ill. "Michigan stocks half of the salmon we put in the lake now, so if you cut out all of the Michigan stocked fish, that would be an overall reduction of 25 percent.
"Michigan would still have lots of salmon because it gets so much natural reproduction, and it wouldn't hurt the rest of us who need stocked fish."
Kaiser made his remarks at a briefing by fisheries managers from the states surrounding Lake Michigan.
A job well done
The basic problem is that salmon, first stocked in the big lake 40 years ago to control exotic alewives, have done that job so well they are eating themselves out of house and home.
Lake Michigan is producing salmon in near-record numbers, and biologists say that if those numbers aren't reduced significantly, the salmon population will collapse like it did last year in Lake Huron.
Salmon in Lake Michigan are 40 percent smaller than 10 years ago, and biologists say the catch rate isn't sustainable.
Others benefit
Jim Dexter, the Lake Michigan basin manager for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, told anglers from Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin that they benefit from the natural reproduction in Michigan because "those fish don't stay in Michigan. A lot of the fish you catch in your waters are fish that naturally reproduced in ours. Salmon are wanderers, and people in Indiana catch chinooks that we stocked in Lake Huron."
But when the Lake Michigan committee makes a decision next month, Michigan likely will cut chinook plants by more than 25 percent, and the other states will make smaller reductions. Dexter said the Lake Michigan group must make its stocking decision in the next two weeks because fall is when states collect the eggs for the fish that will be raised in hatcheries and released in the spring.
"It's a time-consuming and expensive process, and we don't want to waste money raising fish that we won't release," Dexter said.
Lake Michigan gets an annual plant of 4.3 million chinooks -- 2.3 million in Michigan, 1.5 million in Wisconsin, 300,000 in Illinois and 250,000 in Indiana. But half of the chinooks in the lake aren't hatchery fish. They're produced naturally in Michigan rivers such as the Pere Marquette, Manistee and Muskegon. In Lake Huron, natural reproduction accounts for 80 percent of the fish, nearly all of them from Ontario rivers.