schreckstoff

Love the boat Pics SJane & definitely appreciate hearing the history and stories about the LO fishery in the 80s

Walberg Introduces Legislation to Protect Fisheries from Cormorants https://walberg.house.gov/media/press-releases/walberg-introduces-legislation-protect-fisheries-cormorants

Appreciate the timely info!

Regarding salinity ….I guess haven’t really thought about it. In their native habitats Alewife run and spawn in freshwater so I’m not sure there would be any correlation. Best predictors of a good hatch is an early warm spring and summer, and a not so big hatch the year before.

I’m mostly referring to Lake Trout , but also Cisco and Lake Whitefish. Those species spawn in late fall / early winter and their embryos incubate for 4-5 months, overwinter, on the bottom of Lake Ontario. Ideally those embryos would be nestled down in clean rock crevices where there is a little bit of water flow and not a lot of silt or decaying algae on the rocks. Over the past 200 years those habitats have become more and more rare in Lake Ontario and its embayments, which is a leading reason why those populations are less abundant. The spawning habitat additions in Chaumont Bay a few years ago and the substrate cleaning on Lake Eries Brockton shoals last year are experiments trying to figure out the effectiveness of different habitat rehabilitation strategies, In some years a dozen or so wild LT are caught in the trawl surveys. Embryo incubation conditions are better in those years and we are trying to figure out what those conditions are, one hypothesis is that colder years, with more ice, means less silt and better hatches.

Great Pic! When Erie is iced over, there is WAAY less sediment dumping into LO, likely higher embryo survival & better hatch for fish that spawn in Niagara & it’s plume

All interesting ideas, and great discussion. A couple things to keep in mind about Alewife distribution during the April survey. The reason that trawling in Canada AND US waters is because the Alewife distribution appears to change year to year. Some years density is MUCH higher in US waters, some years the opposite, some years it is even. Most Alewife are caught in trawls fished between 150 and 500 feet, whether in Canada or US. Canada happens to have 65% of the lake area at those depths, and US has 35%, which means when Alewife are a little more dense in Canada the increased area of those depths makes the US / CA difference even bigger. Maybe, just maybe, there is some evidence that in colder / longer winters the Alewife might be more in Canadian waters. This could contribute to why for so many years US scientists focused so much emphasis/importance on cold winters as what 'kills' Alewife or reduces recruitment...if the fish were in Canada, and we only surveyed US waters....it looks like they weren't there when it was a survey bias. Now that we sample both sides, and survival estimates make more sense, I can continue to have some bias in our estimates of Age-1 fish. We openly discuss that in the reports. I'll keep working on it figuring out how to survey with less bias by continuing to listen to and incorporating the diverse ideas that you all share. A Spoonpullers post about bias in the 2010 survey results, when US only survey results said Alewife numbers were down but Canadian fishers described more Alewife than they had ever seen is what originally tipped me off to do the analyses and eventually adjust the survey.