tod osier said:
This post needs pics of Kings from back in the day. I'm thinking: mullets (hair style - not fish), healthy tans, cut off jeans and luhr Jensen tackle!
+1 I resembled that in my short Michigan exile in the early 90's, though I do not have any photos.
As with most industrial scale efforts to stock non-native fish , there are a multitude of perspectives on the past, present, and future salmonid fisheries in the Great Lakes. And the issues go way beyond lake trout restoration vs. Pacific salmon sport fish management. The entire ecology of the Great Lakes is different today than it was back in the 1980's--and that was, in part, the goal of the Pacific salmon stocking.
I got this book for Christmas and thought it was a great read on the tremendous difficulties of trying to manage a system as unique as the Great Lakes for multiple use: The Life and Death of the Great Lakes, by Dan Egan. Alewives, lampreys, lake trout decline, introduced salmonids, other invasive fish ranging from round gobies to Asian carp, zebra and quagga mussels, nutrient discharges, algae blooms, water level management and other issues are all covered.
https://www.amazon.com/...aps%2C159&sr=1-1[/quote]
The argument for management programs focused on native fish restoration efforts in large water bodies undergoing multiple use is based on a failed paradigm. Yes, the USFWS and TU have failed to grasp that, yet!
I just attended a TU sponsored fishery forum on Lake Superior. I was amazed to find that sediment traps are now universely regarded as a waste by our TU chapter. Had they actually read and comprehended the study they cite, they would have seen the qualifier and the data that supported the author's conclusion that: in streams that don't have significant upstream deforestation or cutting that increases sediment transport and runoff to the watershed, sediment traps generally contribute to bank erosion and remodeling downstream of the site.
I have read much of Dan Egan's reporting, Yes, he is a reporter, not a fish biologist, nor fishery researcher or a fishery manager. Do you have a plumber come over to wire your house because he understands the physics of electricity flow? I find his take on events similar to be what he has been fed via conversations with fishery managers, politicians, et al...oh, well, that is your choice. Did you folks out in Maine ever look at EMS caused by smelt ingestion as a factor in native salmon stock declines? What does that bring the total to, three potential causative contributors outside of smelt predation on YOY and larvae? Our trout lakes have warmed by four to five degrees over the last couple decades, which largely takes rainbow trout out of the picture as a fishery component. Say, aren't you kids in northern Maine at the same latitude range as the U.P.?
Actually, Jeff, the position paper Tanner and Tody submitted to the National Marine Fishery Service stated the goal of the Pacific salmon introduction program was to convert alewife as a forage stock into a viable sport fishery resource for the population of the State of Michigan, as well as other Great Lakes states. What remained unchecked, largely by Federal oversight error and right-out intervention was the continued inflow and colonization of the Great Lakes by over 100 invasive species identified to date, mostly invertebrates. That invasive introduction that was ecosystem altering, despite all other non-natives was Quagga sp. mussels. Their spread an the consequent restrictions in energy flow, as well as the nutrient sink that their colonies have become, aide by their co-occurring Ponto-Caspian round gobies an Echinogammarus sp. amphipods have had a marked constrictive effect on primary productivity in Lakes Huron, Michigan, Erie, and Ontario. Instead of transport back into surface waters during periods of thermal equilibrium in spring and fall there, we have essentially bound these nutrients within these mussel colonies within a meter of the substrate where pseudofeces packets excreted by Quagga sp mussels are cycled by Echinogammarus sp. invasive amphipods who are fed on by round goby which seldom venture more than a meter or two up into the water column around these colonies. This phenomena changed the dynamic within Lakes Huron, Michigan and Ontario, improving light penetration, which caused a partial offset in production and productivity since addition substrate became part of the photic zone, colonized by periphyton. The Nitrogen and phosphorus that cycle tightly within these exported mini-ecosystems from the ponto-Caspian region function to induce the marked growth of filamentous algal species, much of them blue-greens, which sluff-off to form rolling mats during storms that accumulate in benthic depressions, undergoin bacterial mediated decay which drives dissolved oxygen down in their immediate vicinity, forming "dead zones". Declines in green, browns and desmid phytoplankton transfer to shifts in zooplankton to seasonal stocks dominated by cyclopoid species rather than the larger and more nutritious calanoids like Bosmina sp. an Daphnia sp. Invasive spiny water fleas, Bugensis sp. an Cercopagis sp. further ravage zooplankton stocks via predation lake wide. Declines in the three YO and up age classes of alewife, which feed on these invasives are now significantly diminished or gone, so their "blooms" expand and dominate for much of the summer season in the lower Great Lakes, further diminishing calanoids that serve as high quality forage for native whitefish complex species, and nearly all early life stages of endemic and Great Lakes native fishes.
During periods absent temperature stratification of the water column, Steve Pothoven's group have documented that Quagga sp. mussel colonies strain the entire water column at depths of 70Meters (nearly 300 feet) every five days. Yes, the system has markedly changed from the 1980s, particularly since driessenid mussel dominance that occurred in the early 2000s in Lake Michigan.
Mandenjian and Pothoven found Great Lakes adult alewife to have significantly diminished energy stores in the interval when Quagga sp. mussels became dominant and displaced native Diporeia sp amphipods. This has two averse impacts: adult alewife tap somatic energy stores for gamete production, recovering that lost energy post spawn by moving out to depths 150FOW or more to feed on....Mysis sp. and Diporeia sp. They also documented that salmon would have to increase consumption rates by 21% to compensate, which they did, further reducing alewife stocks. Add in, that lake trout became the numerically dominant salmonine in Lake Michigan in 2007, when the alewife stock had 8-9 year classes of spawning age fish within its numbers. As I said earlier, there is one spawning adult age year class and some change in the current numerically abundant, but biomass and age array diminished alewife stock in Lake Michigan. Alewife in Lake Huron appear to be trapped in a predator pit. Lake trout stocking has been terminated at levels below recovery goal because stocked fish are not surviving. Somewhere between 10 an 17,000 Chinook still swim over to Lake Michigan each spring to feed on alewife, along with the endemic stock of fishes within that water body.
The Great Lakes Fishery Commission recognizes that atlantic salmon, which, based on all evidence never ranged further into the Great Lakes than the Lake Ontario watershed, is deemed a native species, endemic to Great Lakes waters. I find that truly fascinating, since alewife exhibited the same distribution, documented repeatedly in spawning streams in large numbers during the late 1800s in Lake Ontario, yet it is deemed an invasive species and its eradication and/or declines are seen as a benefit to the ecosystem. I also find it quite fascinating that the invasive Pacific salmon have, in all Great Lakes except Lake Erie, developed significant wild stocks, a feat yet to be established for lake trout in all water bodies except Lake Superior(again, the only Great Lake with an intact food web much like that that existed in the post-Pleistocene. Yes, they are nearly totally reliant on alewife for their complete forage array.
Actually, the issues don't go much beyond State's rights and Federal oversight and over-reach, fought-out on the Great Lake via their proxies: Chinook salmon and lake trout.
Then there is the mandated lake trout stocking required via the 2000 Consent Fisheries Decree, but I digress..!
Did I mention I nearly got fired from the USFWS Sea Lamprey Research lab. for giving my Friday seminar: Lake Trout management on the Great Lakes: why manage for "swimming boxes of death" as a long-term goal? I just got tired of constantly hearing "stinky salmon" every couple of days. I had already accepted a job with Merck. Oddly, I just got attacked by two USFWS employees for maligning their agency's efforts to control sea lamprey and restore lake trout at the TU sponsored fishery forum on Lake Superior last week. Let's see: you throw-in fish annually who swim in the same preferred temperature strata as lamprey into the system by the millions, that are fed on by sea lamprey that now grow to produce maximal progeny-seriously, we are managing to maximize sea lamprey fecundity, numerous managers concur that indirectly THAT is the result of the current paradigm. Instead of killing those sea lamprey or removing them prior or during spawning via pheromone traps, light traps, sterile male release in large water bodies. You allow them to spawn and then try to kill their progeny just before the metamorphose to parasitic transformers. Bad things happen to stoneflies, mayflies, and trichoptera during a TFM treatment. Worse things happen to vertebrate fishes when that chemical bank exceeds 6ppm for longer than thirty minutes...but that is another story.
I find it difficult to ride a "dead" horse, perhaps your experience is different given your employer. When the Federal government rescinds a State-level saltwater freighter ballast monitoring and treatment program because it determines that it is too restrictive, you know the deck is rigged
