05-19-2004, 12:18 PM
First published: Thursday, May 6, 2004
There was a time in recent memory when the walleye fishing across Lake Champlain's South Bay was as good as any place in the state.
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Biologists from the DEC and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have confirmed what fishers from boats and on the ice have been saying for years, that the number of walleye in South Bay is a fraction of what it was even as recently as the mid-1980s.
So it was no surprise that fishing activity last weekend around the bottom of Champlain was light for the opener of the walleye and pike season. A shadow of what it once was. No walleye, far fewer fishers.
So now we're left with a pair of mysteries to solve, namely what caused this huge decline in walleye, and what can be done about it?
What to do about it has been answered to some degree by a huge local volunteer effort.
A year ago, with no fisheries experience and only a desire to do something meaningful to reverse the trend, a group from the Whitehall area formed the Lake Champlain Walleye Association, southern chapter, which relates specifically to the shallow, nutrient-rich South Bay where the walleye are crashing. From plans gotten off the Internet, John Rozell and others built a portable hatchery setup.
Then they got the DEC and Fish and Wildlife Service to net them some breeder-quality walleye which they stripped of eggs and milt.
If more babies were needed to restore the walleye fishery, then they were going to make them, coddle them, and put them back into South Bay. Which they did. The first year, working strictly out of their own pockets, they produced 115,000 fry for the lake.
This year's effort is even more impressive, although the knowledge gained along the way about the complexities of managing walleye in Lake Champlain has cast a shadow over all this activity.
At the end of April last year, when walleye should be congregating to spawn in South Bay, the biologists could come up with only two females and five males.
This spring, biologists found 149 walleye, which is still pathetic, says Walleye Association member Thurm O'Neill. "I know plenty of guys who used to catch that many under the ice every year," he said.
But they did manage this time to strip 1.2 million eggs that turned into 800,000 fry, which were in turn released back to Lake Champlain. That's a return rate of 64 percent, comparable to a professional hatchery. That's the good news. The bad news is it may not be doing much good.
Dave Nettles, one of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists involved in the netting and stocking programs both years, was struck last spring by the number of species -- 26 -- that they netted when they were looking for walleye. Included were a number of white perch and white crappie, two species that were not on the radar screen back in the 1980s fish census of the lake.
Both of these, and other invasive species like members of the bass family, are voracious predators of small walleyes.
It's his suspicion that a huge jump in predators is primarily responsible for the crash of the walleyes in Lake Champlain. Not habitat, food supply, or overfishing.
That means the effort by Rozell's Rangers merely feeds the predators. In recognition of that possibility, the volunteer hatchery workers this year held back 400 to 500 fry to grow through the summer to fingerlings, then release them. Nettles says that would be the most effective means of giving the little walleye a fighting chance.
As for dealing with all those predators that may be the problem like northern pike, black crappie and bass -- sought after in their own right -- the answer is regrettably simple if brutal:
Live with it.
Fred LeBrun's outdoors column is published Thursdays. Contact him at 454-5453.
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