In a letter to the Mille Lacs Input Group members, Aitkin Area Fisheries supervisor Rick Bruesewitz said that the walleye population in Mille Lacs Lake hadn’t changed much in the last year, but the young of the year are plentiful, and they’re big.
“The large size of the young-of-the-year walleyes (6-inches-plus) may offer these fish a bit more of an advantage, which can help with their survival,” Bruesewitz said.
Bruesewitz also said there’s abundant forage in the lake. The young-of-the-year perch numbers were the best seen in the forage gill nets since 2006.
Bruesewitz said the anglers’ walleye tally for 2013 will likely come in at about 150,000 pounds. The bands’ harvest was about 15,000 pounds. “Combined that’s well under our cap of 250,000 pounds,” Bruesewitz said.
According to Bruesewitz, the short period of warm weather this summer helped tremendously with keeping the angler catch under allocation. “While it’s too soon to speculate on safe harvest levels, I’m pretty certain they will not be going up,” Bruesewitz said.
The DNR will make a formal regulation announcement in November following analysis of the fall netting data.
“Our number one goal is to improve the walleye fishery as quickly as possible with as little adverse impact to the anglers as possible,” Bruesewitz said.
The rest of the fish
According to Bruesewitz, the harvest of other Mille Lacs fish species was also relatively low this year. State anglers took about 11,000 pounds of northern pike, while Band netters took an additional 3,200 pounds. The total pike kill amounted to 14,200 pounds, well shy of the 50,000-pound cap.
“Only about 1,600 bass were harvested of the 72,000 that were caught this season,” Bruesewitz said.
As far as the current status of species other than walleyes, the results were varied. Adult perch were very low in the assessment nets. “Overall catch was about the same as last year, but the number of fish over 9 inches was the lowest since 1986,” Bruesewitz said. “I wouldn’t expect much from for winter perch fishing.”
Northern pike were abundant in the nets. “Overall catch was 2.75 per net, which is the highest observed since 1983,” Bruesewitz said. “Much of the increase is from younger fish, which is a concern since we would prefer predator biomass be primarily walleye than pike.”
Smallmouth bass showed a similar pattern to the pike. Assessment net catch was up by 50 percent. “While it still had typical numbers of large fish, the numbers of smaller bass was the highest we’ve seen.”
Tullibee numbers are down a little, but they are holding their own at .8 per net onshore and 7.7 per net offshore. “Suspended nets also caught tullibees at levels similar to last year, except for an increase in one-year-old tullibees from last year. The fine mesh forage gill nets caught more young-of-the-year tullibees than we’ve seen in the last two years,” Bruesewitz said. “In spite of the apparent abundance, we did not see large numbers of young-of-the-year tullibees in the diet of the predators so far, suggesting that the perch may be so abundant that they are buffering the tullibees, and may allow for better survival, similar to what we are expecting for walleye.”
For more charts on the fall gillnet survey, see page 2.
