08-06-2020, 11:51 AM
As promised, I checked in with Chris Penne of DWR. As usual, he provided some good info. Thanks, Chris.
We do not have an answer yet on the effectiveness of the sterile walleyes at Echo. About four years ago we funded a project with a fisheries scientist and his graduate student at Utah State University where one of the indirect pieces of information we were to obtain was what percentage of walleye sampled in Echo were stocked (sterile) versus naturally reproduced. That project was never fully completed for various reasons and we never got the info we wanted regarding the proportion of stocked versus naturally reproduced fish. From here on out, we will be obtaining that information on our own, but it may take a few more years to get as it is not currently a high priority and Echo is not on our sampling schedule until next year at the earliest. We don't have a hard population estimate for how many walleye our in Echo as those are rarely done due to cost and time constraints, but we have been collecting standard trend data on numbers of walleye in our nets. The data show that while walleye numbers are slowly increasing, they are still not very abundant in the reservoir. The catch data we collected in 2019 shows evidence of at least three year classes of fish and the oldest year class, which was initially documented in 2016, had individuals as long as 25 inches as of last year, so some of the fish getting quite large. Just based on what we are seeing, I think it's likely the walleye in Echo will ultimately operate similar to those in Deer Creek where they are abundant enough for anglers who know what they are doing to catch, but not so abundant that they create difficulties managing the other species. If I'm wrong, there will probably be more walleye going home with ice fishermen and the boat and kayak/tube crowd. One of the things I've learned managing fisheries along the densely populated Wasatch Front is that when a sport fish species gets abundant and hungry, our large population of anglers is pretty quick to harvest those fish and knock their numbers back in line.
As always, feel free to post and I'm happy to take any other questions that can't easily be answered.
Chris
We do not have an answer yet on the effectiveness of the sterile walleyes at Echo. About four years ago we funded a project with a fisheries scientist and his graduate student at Utah State University where one of the indirect pieces of information we were to obtain was what percentage of walleye sampled in Echo were stocked (sterile) versus naturally reproduced. That project was never fully completed for various reasons and we never got the info we wanted regarding the proportion of stocked versus naturally reproduced fish. From here on out, we will be obtaining that information on our own, but it may take a few more years to get as it is not currently a high priority and Echo is not on our sampling schedule until next year at the earliest. We don't have a hard population estimate for how many walleye our in Echo as those are rarely done due to cost and time constraints, but we have been collecting standard trend data on numbers of walleye in our nets. The data show that while walleye numbers are slowly increasing, they are still not very abundant in the reservoir. The catch data we collected in 2019 shows evidence of at least three year classes of fish and the oldest year class, which was initially documented in 2016, had individuals as long as 25 inches as of last year, so some of the fish getting quite large. Just based on what we are seeing, I think it's likely the walleye in Echo will ultimately operate similar to those in Deer Creek where they are abundant enough for anglers who know what they are doing to catch, but not so abundant that they create difficulties managing the other species. If I'm wrong, there will probably be more walleye going home with ice fishermen and the boat and kayak/tube crowd. One of the things I've learned managing fisheries along the densely populated Wasatch Front is that when a sport fish species gets abundant and hungry, our large population of anglers is pretty quick to harvest those fish and knock their numbers back in line.
As always, feel free to post and I'm happy to take any other questions that can't easily be answered.
Chris