That’s the assessment as fisheries managers start to wrap up their yearly look at how the iconic species is doing in portions of lakes Michigan and Huron and in eastern Lake Superior.
The stock assessment, which has historically been each year but will now go to an every-three-year cycle, is part of the Great Lakes Fishing Decree, which dictates how partners from tribal, federal and state governments manage fisheries in northern Michigan’s waters.
Biologists have used computer models to track whitefish in Lake Michigan and Huron for several years. And the numbers have consistently been trending down.
But this year, after biologists tweaked the formula for a more accurate count of just how many whitefish there are, in almost every case in the lower lakes, the model spit out much lower abundance than in past years.
'We’re gonna need … 60 or so million people that live near the shores of the Great Lakes to care that these fish are headed towards extirpation."Jason Smith, fisheries biologist
“None of us were surprised,” said Jason Smith, a fisheries biologist with Bay Mills Indian Community in the Upper Peninsula. “It's possible that as biologists, we didn't do a good enough job of raising the alarm widely to the public, but amongst ourselves … we have known that we were in the middle of a crisis.”
The most recent assessment took into account something different, giving scientists a more accurate picture of how many whitefish are in the lakes.
That something different? Green Bay, Wisconsin.
“During all this decline in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, the whitefish in Green Bay were doing really well,” Smith said. “They were doing so well, in fact, that many of those fish swam out of Green Bay and got captured in places like Muskegon in Lake Michigan, like De Tour in Lake Huron.”
But until recently, the models couldn’t really tell the difference between a whitefish from Green Bay and a whitefish from somewhere else.
That changed this time around. And scientists found that those Green Bay fish were artificially inflating whitefish abundance in other places throughout Lakes Michigan and Huron.
This year, models gave a more accurate, more dire picture.
“Even if we bring [commercial fishing] harvest to zero, the lakes are still headed toward extirpation,” Smith said.
In other words, Smith says, lake whitefish could disappear from certain parts of the Great Lakes within the next five years.
They’re struggling because invasive quagga and zebra mussels are making it extremely difficult for whitefish to reach adulthood in Lake Michigan and Huron.
“These non-local beings basically have disrupted the food chain in a way that adikameg — lake whitefish — can no longer really make a living in the main basin of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan,” Smith said.
These mussels suck tons of nutrients out of the water, leaving very little left for young whitefish.
“If we go back, say, to the peaks of whitefish, in each liter of [lake] water, there'd be somewhere between 100 and 700 zooplankton. So 100 to 700 nice little bite sized meals for a baby whitefish,” Smith said.
A few years back, Smith and other biologists sampled for zooplankton in northern Lake Michigan.
“We actually had a 30-meter tow in which we did not capture a single zooplankton,” he said. “It’s really unheard of. When I tell people we had a zooplankton tow that didn’t have a zooplankton in it, limnologists actually don’t believe me.”
So, the solution? Smith says there are a couple. First, more funding for figuring out how to control quagga and zebra mussels in the lakes.
And second, more time for figuring out how to give whitefish a boost with rearing and stocking programs.
Scientists from federal, tribal and state governments are working on these.
“But we’re gonna need … 60-or-so-million people that live near the shores of the Great Lakes to care that these fish are headed towards extirpation,” Smith said.
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