Trout fishing this weekend.

[Nershi]

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.

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.

Personally I don't want to eat a fish that has been recently eating pellets. I have no problem eating stocked fish that have spent a year or two in the system though.

I wouldn't mind seeing a put and take pheasant program in our state like WI has. I don't consider it the same as hunting but it would be fun for the dogs and hunters. Lots of areas in SD are essentially put and take run programs by the resorts. Trucks drop off the birds at night.

[Quack]

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People credit wood duck boxes for bringing them back but that's completely incorrect. A fraction of a percent today nest in all the wood duck boxes there are.

What brought them back was not allowing hunters to shoot them.[/quote]

Actually if you look at the status of America’s forests, especially east of the Mississippi River, from 1900-1950, it was severely cutover and there was a serious lack of trees large enough to produce cavities for nesting.

So I would say next boxes were part of the solution.

Nowadays the forest has aged, (just ask the ruffed grouse society) logging and land management has evolved in such a way that natural nest cavities are probably not limiting.... but the populations of winged and furry predators is also a lot higher than any time in the past 100 years.


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[Fish Felon]

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.

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.....

[Quack]

Why the infatuation with a wild invasive species versus the fez hatchery truck dumping them off?

Would you then speculate that most of the fez east of the Mo River in South Dakota are genetically composed of largely “released” birds? There’s no doubt the fez population there took a beating over the past decade as CRP turned into ethanol production.

Just curious, not really an engaged stakeholder. Haven’t shot or even hunted wild fez for years but used to.


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[Nershi]

FF I’m well aware of the increased cost for yearlings or fingerlings vs fry. There are ways to do it cheaper than our current program. Private parties and other states manage to do it at an affordable cost. Our dnr could get creative and do it as well. They’d just need to commit to the concept. Stop spending so much money of raising millions upon millions of fry and put that money towards larger fish and less of them. We got a lot of water to work with in this state that makes for good reading ponds.

Some stocking of fry in lakes whether it be musky or walleyes is basically a complete waste. Fingerlings or yearlings would be successful in those lakes. Why keep doing what isn’t working? Stop stocking them all together or stock fish that will actually make it to adulthood.

Didn’t have time to read the rest of your reply right now.

[Fish Felon]

I don't think you understand how little expense there is for fry relative to how much expense there is for yearlings. It's not like they're spending a ton of money on stocking fry per lake. You could say there's a decent amount spent on it collectively for the entire state. There's around 700 lakes stocked with walleyes....if you're swapping out fry for yearlings they could do like twelve lakes with the same budget.

The other thing is by stocking yearlings you treating a symptom and not the disease. If dumping a million or two walleye fry in a lake....so like a gallon bucket....only produces a year class of like five adult walleyes......

....the problem isn't that fry were stocked instead of adults.....the problem is the lake is fukced.

What needs to be done isn't stocking, it's removal. Until the you get the pike population under control in a lake like that stocking a bunch of adult walleyes in it is only going exacerbate the problem of stunting and the forage base being decimated since walleyes and pike have a large amount of overlap in their preferred forage, namely perch.

The DNR is able to stock a couple dozen 6"-to-9" fingerlings for the price of one 9"-12" yearling. I'm telling you....well, let me put it this way....if it's a lake near and dear to me that I like to fish and I get to pick?

I'm going with fingerlings all day long.

Yes, yearlings have a better survival rate than fingerlings but it's not twenty five times better. All you need to get out of those couple dozen fingerlings to make it is two and you just doubled your walleyes making it to adulthood by stocking fingerlings versus yearlings. Let's say it's 25 fingerlings per 1 yearling for cost but the fingerlings have only a 20% survival rate versus the yearlings 90%......and these figures aren't exact or anything but are close enough to illustrate my point so you'll see where I'm coming from.....

A lake association A raises $15K and stocks 1000 yearlings. They wind up with 900 adult walleyes in their stocked year class.

Lake association B raises the same amount of money but buys fingerlings instead...25,000 of them. 80% get eaten before reaching adulthood leaving "only" 5,000 that do make it.

And therein is why the DNR doesn't mess around with stocking yearlings. Why would they?

And I don't disagree with you on most of your points. I totally agree that the DNR needs to stock fewer lakes and concentrate their efforts on the ones that are proven to produce the most effective results.

And they're already making the switch towards doing this ever since they did the study on increased stocking. Out of the 700 lakes stocked, two out of three showed no increase in amount of adult walleyes from increased stocking efforts. It was totally pointless....just expensive fish food for little pike.

Part of the study was stocking fingerlings in a lot of lakes that'd previously only received fry.

As a result between the two you're going to see selective stocking to few lakes but the ones that are stocked will receive more walleyes dumped in with a higher percentage being fingerlings....and this will produce really good fishing on those lakes.

I think most of what you're hoping to see is already taking place.

Cheers to that being the case!

[Nershi]

Well I think we basically agree. In my first post I used fingerlings and yearlings interchangeably which are too different things, so my bad. I meant fingerlings over fry when it comes to walleye. Fry seem mostly worthless on most lakes. They are prey for basically everything.

There has been discussions about going to yearlings over fingerlings for musky stocking on the lakes that have been established with adult populations. Don’t have time to type out all the details but the theory is that the adult muskies target the young muskies and since they share the same habitat, survival to adulthood is very low. There are lots of passionate musky guys who help pitch in on the cost and volunteer their time to help the dnr make that happen. Some in the MI metro chapter have been pushing for this.

[Fish Felon]

Yeah, apples to oranges talking stocking muskies versus walleyes.

I definitely agree with the concept on it's face that stocking yearling or even older muskies would be the best way to do it in a lot of lakes.

But you're talking about a low density top predator versus a medium sized predator slash often prey species. With walleyes it's all about numbers. The goal is to have a bunch of them make it to eating size so guys can catch them, bring them home, filet, and fry them.....and they want to do this early, often, and late. A fish that guys want to take home four to six daily versus.....


....a fish that will most likely never be caught and removed from the fishery by an angler...ever. There's the very real chance that it will die of old age. So extremely low density when compared to walleyes and literally never gets removed.....

......paying to stock yearlings to adults is a lot more feasible and practical due to only needing to successfully get only a handful here and there to make it to maintain a trophy, world class muskie fishery.

[gimpfinger]

They stock yearlings in the stream around me. They have been making to the next year since last year or two fish is all ive been after and catching.

[Nershi]

No egg gathering by dnr this year due to covid. Only fish stocked will be leftovers in the rearing ponds.

On an unrelated note, smelt are running. Supposed to be all locals but judging by the amount of Russians and hmongs on the beach I’d say there’s lot of city folks coming up. Had a good smelt fry this week. Wet batter was definitely better than dry. It’s been a few years and they are better than I had recalled.