Nershi wrote:They'd produce more adult fish if they stocked yearling instead of fry. Stock significantly less fish that are fingerlings and do away with stocking fry and they'd be more successful. Fry are prey for every fish in the lake. Fingerlings are not.
Fingerlings are expensive, fry are not....the DNR shouldn't be in the business of stocking yearlings in large volumes in my opinion. Leave that up to private fish farms/growers/rearers or whatever they're called to supply them. Or basically privatize that portion of the DNR to operate like a business. If a lake association wants to stock yearlings than they can pay the $12+ per fish to do it.
If you ever get a chance to watch the TPT show on the fish hatchery in SE MN (Lanesboro?) It's pretty cool. Basically it's a tank connected to a trout steam. There's no need for aerators, filters, cleaning, temperature control, and all the manpower it takes to run and maintain it = $$$$ Huge Savings $$$$$
The cost to strip eggs and milk fish and then hatch those eggs into fry and raise them for a year? It ain't cheap.
The cost to get some eggs, milk, hatch them into fry and throw them in a lake? Pretty cheap. Definitely the cheapest option. Fry are as effective as the lake they're being put in allows them to be.
The cost to get eggs, milk, hatch them into fry and raise them into fingerlings? A hell of a lot more expensive than fry but still relatively reasonable. As much as some duck hunters despise it...it's amazingly effective to throw a bunch of fry into a shallow slough. They warm up fast, are more fertile, are devoid of other fish species minus minnows. You throw a bunch of fry in a slough in the spring, come back in the fall with some guys, a truck with a big tank of water on it, net the fukcer out (obviously picking sloughs more conducive for this) and then dump this fingerlings in other lakes and besides the sizable transportation and manpower costs there aren't any other expenses.
When you get to yearlings though....that's when shit gets complicated. Shallow sloughs devoid of other fish are great for a growing season but they're devoid of fish for a reason....winterkill. So to grow yearlings you have to do the process of fingerlings and then raise them the rest of the way in captivity of some kind. Large tanks, or large ponds with aerators....because any body of water that is big enough to support them and also not winter kill is also going to be full of pike and other prey fish to where you're losing a lot, not to mention it's pretty hard to seign a lake....it's not something a handful of guys wearing waders and a couple dudes in a jon boat to cover the deepest part at 5' can do.
So now you're stuck eating significant...very significant costs when compared to those fingerlings that you've got nothing into at all besides transport costs and paying a little labor and you could've just dumped those 6"-9" walleyes in a lake and been done....but no....instead they need to be 10" to 13"
The amount of effort and cost that logistically goes into getting a few extra inches on those walleyes is enough to make you wonder if the guys doing it mistakenly think they're adding a few inches to their peckers because that's about the only thing that would make sense of the cost of giant, aerated, pellet fed, high maintenance ponds and tanks and labor to run them to grow a fish a few extra inches. It's be like buying a decent sized hot dog for under a buck and then seeing they have a jumbo dog on the menu and getting the same thing but a third to half more bigger than the other but paying $13.50 for it.....you realize it's a much better deal to fill yourself up on a shitload of the original dogs...hell, drop a couple, give a couple away to people passing by, throw a few in the trash. Even if you lose half of them it still pencils out to be a WAY better deal.
Nershi wrote:They should also stock way less lakes but stock more in the lakes that have high success rates and the forage to support the fish once they are adults. Create really good fishing on less lakes instead of marginal to terrible fishing on lots and lots of lakes. Lots of lakes they stock every year are not walleye lakes and they never will be. Those are my armchair thoughts on our stocking programs in the state anyways.
....and herein lays the conundrum.
Those lakes with really good forage bases?
Those are the lakes where stocking fry works really well. Sure, you lose most of them but you don't need many to make it...one out of a hundred....out of a million is 10,000 ...10K walleyes is a decent to phenomenal year class in most lakes.....
....so you lose 99 put of a hundred and get a bumper year class because the fry are a part of the forage base.....they aren't 'the' forage base.
Which would you rather be:
The wildebeest crossing lion infested plains as one out of 10,000 head?
The wildebeest crossing the same lion infested plains in a herd by itself...."paging loser....party of one. Loser...paging loser....you're table for one is ready, you'll be seated laying on top of it eith an apple in your mouth.
It's all about balancing Fisheries. You'll can't do much to them successfully in any facet until you get it balanced, or marginally balanced where the perch bounce back, eat the sunfish eggs and stup their population from exploding and stunting, plus with ample perch walleye fry and fingerling stocking take hold.
Remember, two out of three MN lakes didn't benefit at all from increased stocking efforts, some drastic....didn't matter how many fry or fingerlings you put in....it won't raise the walleye population more than maybe a tick.
Pike at 6 CPE and perch at 20 CPE (or CPUE same difference). That's the line drawn where if you're not below it with pike and or/above it worth perch......there's no point. It's a pretty generous margin considering the state average for pike CPE is half that way 3 CPE. You lose all your big pike you don't have a chance of getting below 6 CPE and you don't have a chance at having walleye stocking work. That's why I love big pike and love muskies. There's probably not a bigger muskie lover non-muskie fisherman in the state. If it was up to me I'd stock muskies damn near everywhere.....
.....and have walleyes more abundant than ever....the perch forage bases required to have walleye even more abundant.
But instead we got dipshits that have seen 'Jaws' too many times stopping muskie stocking because they think their kid is going to lose their leg swimming at the cabin...
....fukcing morons.
I'd be opposed to the WI pheasant stocking. My ex-wife's uncle was blown away that MN had wild pheasants and would shoot two to three hundred thousand every year of wild birds. The reason why they can stock pheasants like that in WI is because they don't have wild birds. My understanding is if you stocked pheasants like that where there are wild birds.......
......you'd no longer have wild birds.
It's tempting though I will say. I had a buddy from Baraboo that'd shoot 30-40 pheasants hunting management areas by his house on his ride home from work during pheasant season.
I'd still take wild birds.....so would've my ex's uncle.....was shocked MN had wild birds....sat the rest of the day marveling about how we had wild birds while watching football. Not patronizing or being insincere or simply trying to be a hospitable host.....legitimately marveling in learning that.....day dreaming aloud about how wonderful it'd be to hunt wild pheasants..........the grass is always greener I guess.....