Walleye World
Walleye is the species of the Northwoods fishery that represents the connection between the recreational world of fishing and the food world of sustenance. Its history spans thousands of years of human culture following geological time. It is a species that is both predator of other species and prey in the aquatic world including humans from long ago to the present. Humans are loving walleye to death just as we are the destroying fish habitat of the lakes of the Northwoods with development.
Resource management for the love of this species seems to be making wrong turns and it is now threatening its existence in the future. In our attempt to maintain or increase abundance of walleye and other predatory fish we are forgetting the sound principle that we cannot improve on nature. Walleye exists because it has survived through evolutionary time with adaptations from its lover of low light to specifics of its life history. Biologists are realizing the negative effects of stocking hatchery raised fish on natural reproducing populations and the perturbations of human activities on our waterways seems to interfere with the natural functioning of our waterways to produce fish.
If we look at the history of walleye management in Wisconsin … and I suspect the much of the waters of Minnesota … many problems are becoming evident. Political forces do interfere with scientific findings, but scientific studies are designed to give specific and narrow perspective of life histories of fish and aquatic systems over a brief period. The worlds of understanding characteristics of waterbodies of lakes and river systems and the connections to fish management seems to be disconnected from an ecological understanding of the whole. For example, the lake specialist and citizen scientist have their seechi disc (instrument of water clarity)/water quality protocol) and fish managers and scientists a protocol for fish population estimates for regulation of harvest. Both create suspected solutions to meet their goals but too often fall short. We in return have declining water quality and fisheries. It is time for a new way of looking at how we see the aquatic world of both.
Fisheries researchers/managers and water scientists are rushing to grasp the concept that water bodies that support walleye are falling to climate change and global warming. They follow the money coming from our federal government and center their reactions on it as a cause of a failing or future further failing of our walleye fishery. They do this to justify reducing bag limits of walleye while moving towards management of its fisheries towards a warm water fishery. Meanwhile, nutrients are accumulating in our waterways creating and compounding water quality problems, surfacing as blue-green algae blooms. We should be concentrating on management of our waters and fisheries for removal of nutrients by allowing more fish to be harvested. Data on what are good age growth parameters for every species of fish is abundant in resource files and should be a basis for this action.
Every water body is different, but we have past research and data that define what the general parameters of a healthy water body are. This can be applied to all water bodies even though they vary in temperatures and hydrology. For example, this relates to biological natural lake cycles each growing season that provides nutrition (nutrients) for the food chain that includes walleye and other top food predators of the general fish population. We need to use this understanding for a lake, reservoir, or river/ lake systems for community management. Guided resource management for ecological functioning that addresses good fish grow represented by many year classes of each species will require education of community residents who care and take the time to understand the process.