DNR director visits Presque Isle County

Michigan DNR director Rebecca Humphries and her family paid a visit to the area over the weekend to participate in the annual sturgeon-fishing event on Black Lake. Humphries was up early Saturday morning to sign in at 7 a.m. and head out to the ice shanty for a chance to spear a sturgeon during the Black Lake Sturgeon Shivaree, now in its 44th year. While sitting in the shanty and peering into the four-by-eight-foot cut in the ice with her daughter, Jenny, fishing alongside, the DNR director talked about the experience.

“THIS PROGRAM is an excellent example of how we can restore a population and still allow traditional sports enthusiasts to go out and take a small number of these magnificent fish,” she said. The 25-year veteran employee of the DNR was selected to serve as director of the agency last summer. She talked about how the sturgeon restoration program has evolved over the years.

“The current program has been in effect since around 2000. Before that spearing had been closed down because there was a lot of concern that the fish would be pushed to extinction primarily due to poaching,” she said. “That’s when this current partnership came together to prevent illegal poaching and provide a compromise of allowing very limited harvests, something we could sustain.

“Less than one percent of the mature population is involved in this harvest. At the same time there is some really good research going on. About half the fish out in the lake have been marked,” she added.

HUMPHRIES DESCRIBED the Head Start program for sturgeon that has been conducted in association with the DNR and volunteers from the Sturgeon for Tomorrow organization, headed by Brenda Archambo of Black Lake. “When the sturgeon are coming back in from the river, volunteers capture them and take them down to the DNR hatchery at Wolf Lake.

“The fish are raised in an environment that is free from predators and has plenty of high quality food. They grow very quickly under those conditions and then they are released back into the lake. “In talking to Brenda, the plan in the near future is to try and rear them right here in the same water source.

“Sturgeon are pretty susceptible to fungal infections and it’s possible to treat that. It’s a great program but it’s going to take a number of years to see what the impact is going to be on the population,” she concluded.

THE DIRECTOR also talked about other fish stocking and marking efforts by the DNR in the Great Lakes. She described a new technique that could conceivably identify every fish that is released by the state’s fish hatcheries. “If we fin-clip the fish, it’s very tedious, time-consuming, and labor intensive. There are new automated systems that run the fish through chutes after they have been sorted by size. “The fish are digitally measured and photographed, and then a little wire tag is inserted in the snout and the fin is clipped, all in less than a second for each individual fish.

“The research potential of this type of program is tremendous. Michigan, along with other states in the Great Lakes Basin is looking into the possibility of going in together to buy this equipment. “The idea would be to put the equipment in mobile units and take it around to the various hatcheries.

“Specifically, we want to see how it works on lake trout first because it hasn’t been used for that species before. Also, we want to find out how many of these rigs we would need to cover the whole Great Lakes Basin because we are marking a whole lot of fish all at the same time. “Between the salmon and the lake trout there is enough timing difference in the release cycles that we could get by with less equipment and save money that way. “The goal would be to do 100 percent marking from all our hatcheries,” she said.

THE DISCUSSION inevitably turned to the salmon catches around Rogers City and the northeast part of the state. The director was asked whether the lower yields and smaller sizes of salmon in recent years were due to disease, loss of forage, or commercial fishing. “I heard Tammy Newcomb give a presentation on this subject about a month ago. She is the coordinator of the Lake Huron Basin for the DNR Fisheries Division. “The general consensus among the researchers and wildlife specialists is that it is a forage problem. As the alewives have decreased in numbers it has really impacted the predator fish in the lake.

“While some fish have benefited from that decrease, walleye in particular, it certainly has had an impact on other species like salmon. “We don’t know what’s going to happen with the alewives at this stage. That’s the other part of the equation. They tend to be somewhat cyclic but whether they will come back or not is another matter.”

SHE WAS ASKED if it was possible to stock the forage fish as we currently stock the game fish to provide a stable source of food for the salmon and lake trout. “That’s one of the things they are looking at but I don’t know how much more of that we want to do at this stage. The alewives themselves are

not native. “They were introduced to the lakes when the seaway was opened and then the salmon were brought in partly to control the alewives that were piling up along the shores in droves.”

“One key area of research is in looking at how all this might balance out. I think we will have some answers in the near future.

“I don’t know how much more we want to add to the system before that research is complete. “We are doing a lot of work on recovering the lake trout population in the lake. That’s one thing we want to accomplish in the near future,” she concluded.

About this time a small school of walleye swam into view and it was time to get back to fishing.

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