The season for salmon fishing in Michigan is coming to a close. And for fisheries managers, it's time to plan for the future.
The Michigan Department of Natural Resources wrapped up its annual fall egg take for Chinooks this week. These eggs will become the fish you might catch a couple years from now.
Since the 1960s, Chinook – or king – salmon have been raised and released from hatcheries around the state. And every year, it all starts in the Little Manistee River.
“It’s just a really good productive river for natural habitat for these fish,” said Joe Mickevich, a fisheries technician supervisor with the DNR.
“Everybody wants to go after the Chinook,” Mickevich said. “There’s nothing like them to catch, in Michigan, anyway. We’ve created this fishery that we want to keep going.”
THE PROCESS
By the shores of the river sits a garage-like building, right above the weir – a gate that keeps fish from moving upstream. Inside the facility, they're doing the dirty work it takes to keep the fishery going.
This egg take is how the DNR gets all the chinook eggs that supply its hatcheries. It looks almost like an assembly line at a factory. Fish are guided into big pools, where they're picked up by a mechanical basket and dumped onto a sorting table.
DNR staff with big rubber gloves inspect the flopping fish and choose only mature Chinooks; the rest are returned to the river.
The salmon left are ready to spawn. In the river, these fish would have died naturally, shortly after spawning. But during the egg take it happens a bit faster.
“We actually knock them out with a pneumatic gun that has a plunger,” said Mickevich. “It’s like a framing nailer that’s designed for the poultry business to humanely kill farm animals.”
The female salmon are then taken to the other side of the room, where a small needle hangs from a retractable hose.
“It looks like something you would blow a basketball up with, but sharper,” Mickevich said. “So we'll poke that through their abdomen and put about maybe a pound or two of air pressure in there – just enough to help extract those eggs.”
Those eggs are caught in a bucket, and then fertilized.
“For the males what that looks like is a squeeze of the belly. We’ll get some of the milt out which contains the sperm,” said Mickevich.
That milt is squeezed into a Dixie cup – nothing fancy – and added to a bucket of eggs.
These fertilized eggs will be shipped to hatcheries all over the state, and in Indiana and Illinois, too. So the chances are good that if you catch a king salmon in any of those states, you can thank the Little Manistee River.
“They made that decision well over 50 years ago that this was going to be a good egg take collection place,” said Mickevich. “And they built this weir. It was in the late 60s when they first put the salmon program in place.”
MANAGING ANOTHER FISH
The goal of the salmon stocking program was to control alewives: a small prey fish native to the Atlantic ocean. Back then, alewives had become a real nuisance as seasonal die-offs left huge stinky piles on the beaches of the Great Lakes. But then came Pacific salmon.
“They were planting those as a predator towards alewives,” said Mickevich.
Alewives have declined since salmon were introduced. And in response, the DNR lowered the number of salmon in its hatcheries to avoid too many predators and not enough prey in Lake Michigan.
The DNR went from stocking over 3 million salmon per year in the late 90s all the way down to 650,000 fish in recent years.
But now, this year’s egg take will again start increasing the number of Chinook salmon raised in hatcheries.
“There are a lot of indicators that are showing us that this alewife population is returning,” Mickevich said. “So that gives us an indication that we can start increasing that stocking back.”
If you spent any time on Lake Michigan this summer, you might have noticed the little dead fish lining the beach. Those were alewives – but Mickevich said those die-offs aren’t the only indicator that they’re making a comeback.
Recent surveys also showed alewives of various age groups. That suggests a growing population. Mickevich said the DNR has also noticed bigger, healthier Chinook coming upstream. He said that means there’s plenty of food for the salmon, and that it’s safe to add more this spring.
“We’re taking roughly a million more eggs this year than we took last year for in-state, and that’s for purpose of stocking more fish,” said Mickevich.
If all goes according to plan, more Chinooks will keep alewives in check – and your chances of catching a king salmon in Michigan will be looking up in the coming years.
