The number of one-on-one high-needs
kids skyrocketing.
Well, then clearly that's an
indication that districts are
classifying in that direction
because it's 100% fun.
And then they can get the state to
pay for the staff and it's becoming
a basically baby system.
Thank you very much.
So how long have you been with DNR?
Six years, this is my third year
here.
So, low man on, toe-in-a-pole-in'
away, but I like giving tours,
and when Gary mentioned
that we all just sign up for tours,
you know, I've had people, one of
the things I say right when we're
standing pretty much right here is
that, you now, we don't bring
any adult fish back here.
I mean, get some looks between
couples, and they're like, well,
what are we doing Yeah, so.
Yeah, because you harvest all eggs
in the...
Yep, only for realize I
could get brought back here.
No, we've been working with walleyes
for tomorrow, so some of them are
mobile hatcheries.
Sure, sure.
Good to see that process.
Yeah, those are cool, yeah.
Yeah
Oh yeah, yeah, it's
almost like oh that was like an
aspirational thing like and then
we'll get into some wildlife.
We started doing the math on that,
and it's a lot of time, a lot
effort, a lot of money now with, you
know, the way electronics and...
That's gone.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, and then half those guys just
throw him back.
Oh, I know.
I know and I do the creel
surveys in the winter and
it's nice to meet people who are,
oh we're just catching release, but
for our purposes it's also nice to
see some fish up on the ice.
That's a good one. No, I don't know.
In some places, we
stock at a rate of,
you know, seven or nine,
expecting it to all even out at
three, you also.
People look at our stocking reports
and they think, oh, this is going to
be a good one.
And it's the reason we put so many
fish in sometimes.
Yeah.
So he's kind of stocking it,
but that is interesting.
OK.
We've done a lot up on Namacoggin,
and reading some of the reports
there, like they used to be at
over nine.
Yeah, yeah
like then they crash come back
and they're like above average but
it's still not even half of what it
was right right peak and it's like
that gives you the sense of like
I do a lot of deer hunting I like
you remember like yeah you see 50
deer a day kind of thing right well
that was the peak never come back
Yep, those are good old days, yeah.
Like that's not coming back in
anyone who thinks it is, like they
played in the DNR like oh there's
no, all the wolves, they
were way overpopulated.
Down in like the south of here.
Used to be thought of as just a
world-class walleye destination for
trophy-sized fish.
Supposedly they're still out there,
but their numbers are so low it's
just become impossible to catch
them.
You know, we'll go stalk them, but
you got to tell people, You
know, like seven, eight years, you
know, your tannin
stained like flowages and whatever.
Well, just even going over to
Marinette and into the Bay of Green
Bay where it's like three-year-old
fish are full size.
Yes. Yeah.
And they've got huge fish, but
that's such a giant body of water,
most people can't even safely bring
their boat out.
Right, right.
They're eating different stuff too
and there's a lot there, yeah.
I'm good to go when you guys are.
So our Emke Statefish Hatchery,
founded in 1901, is
originally called the Monaco fish
hatchery and then the name changed
to the Woodruff fish hatchetry.
The reason for our location here,
we're pretty centrally located
amongst a lot of clear
freshwater lakes, good
places for us to harvest eggs from
and also good places for
our fish to end up.
The hatchery began raising mostly
black bass, so your small mouth
and large mouth bass.
Over the years we've transitioned to
what's known as a cool
water hatchery, so cool water
meaning we're pretty much set up to
raise walleye, northern pike,
musky, some
sturgeon, but as
it is now we raise
our musky to a
foot long fish and then two sizes
of walleye. So we raise out
small fingerling walleye they
will get put out into lakes
around Memorial Day.
Our large fingerling walleye,
which are going to be eight to nine
inches. They're going to get put out
around Labor Day
The reason for the name
Art Emkey Art was
Supervisor here and he
was pretty integral in the way that
we raise our musky As
far as walleye go
I think this year
We have 13 of our
15 lined ponds
are being utilized to
raise walleye
As far as the split goes, we mostly
focus on walleye here.
This sign right here gives
kind of a pretty
simplified, you
know, basically timeline
for what we deal with here at the
hatchery.
So for walleye,
as soon as the ice goes out on a
lake, we're going to be out looking
for where we're gonna set our nets.
I should mention that
we do not take
any adult fish back to the hatchery
it's only going to be fertilized
eggs coming here.
So ice is off the lake we have open
water we're gonna put boats on and
for walleye we're typically looking
for pea-sized gravel
maybe what you might consider
rubble on the
bottom of the lake up near shore
maybe you know three to
five feet of water.
Walleye you're not typically going
to see them during daylight hours,
so we're looking for their spawning
habitat.
And we have a lot of historical data
on where that is on any given lake.
So we're going to set our nets,
we're gonna take our
eggs, and I'm going to get into that
in a little bit, but those eggs are
going to come back to the hatchery
and within 10 days
you're going start seeing, looks
like salt and pepper at the bottom
of the jar. Those are their eyes.
So their eyes are going form
anything that's not
showing this
sign here, this eye up,
we're gonna assume was never
fertilized.
So, typically for us.
We're looking at 60
plus percent, 60 to 90 percent
success with our fertilization.
For some comparison, in the
wild, walleye are
lucky to achieve one percent.
A lot of that's just inshore water
movement, kind of
making it so that the
sperm can never meet the egg.
So those eggs are gonna sit
and do their thing. They're gonna
hatch.
17 days into this process,
they're going to hatch as what's
known as a sack fry.
So this little kind
of belly that you can see here,
that's their yolk sac.
It's still attached to them.
Their fins have not fully developed
yet and they're not able
to freely swim.
They're kind of just wiggling
around at the bottom of
the jars.
We let them absorb their
yolk sack. We try not to bother them
too much during this time frame.
Once that's been absorbed, they're
going to swim out of their jars, and
I'll explain that when we get down
to the hatchery, but they're
pretty much ready to go into our
ponds.
So they go into the ponds, and this
is a fairly nice
large fingerling walleye here.
So generally speaking,
the way we do things, we will
harvest out our small fingerlings
and a portion of those
small fingerlings get planted back
into our ponds for
extended growth.
Interacted with this fish once
before.
The grand scope of what's going on
in a large fingerling pond is
pretty much unknown until we go to
harvest those out.
So like I said, right around Labor
Day.
Do you want me to talk about?
You can run a little bit through
yeah, okay, so is it that different
or?
It's only just the time frame
difference and the
spawning habitat. I guess I can talk
about it here.
So this is what's called
a Fike Net.
The Fike net consists
of basically three main components
you've got. What I'm holding onto
right now, this is the lead.
It's a curtain of netting with
your floats on top and
lead on the bottom.
It literally leads the fish into
the remainder of the net.
So
On a typical lake we might set as
many as a dozen of these,
sometimes it's only two or three
that are necessary.
What's going to happen is those fish
are going to be swimming along
looking for their spawning
ground and they're swimming up
pretty tight to shore typically at
night and they're going to bump this
net and basically they're
gonna treat this like the shoreline.
So they're going to follow it down.
All the way to these
frames here.
Would you guys like to come over
this way?
So, once they're lead into these
frames,
this portion of netting I'm tugging
on here is sewn shut for
this display net.
But they're gonna be funneled down
in through the frames,
through two successive funnels,
and into what's called the pot end
of the net.
So, they're smart enough
to know they don't wanna be in here,
but they can't really navigate
their way back out.
They're going to end up in this pot
end of the net and once a day during
our spawning season we're going lift
all of our nets.
So we're gonna untie from
your anchor and lift
this first hoop onto the bow of the
boat.
Untying this little cinch knot here
gives you access to everything that
was caught the night before.
If we're out walleye spawning,
anything that's not a walleye is
going to be safely released
immediately.
Those walleye are gonna get put on
board our boat in holding tanks.
Typically, with walleye,
you're gonna be spawning at the
net.
So you're going to gather fish on
board.
You're going take whatever
measurements you might need.
Look for existing fin clips.
You might have to clip
some fins if it's necessary.
And then we're gonna go through
what's called the dry spawning
method.
So picture like a glass,
a plastic salad bowl.
You're gonna express the eggs for
multiple females into that.
I always have people ask, you know,
how hard do you have to push on
these fish?
We're not going to spawn anything
that's not ready to give
eggs. So it's a pretty
gentle procedure.
You fill up that salad bowl,
Wait a second.
You
Where is it?
So we fill up that salad bowl,
leaving some room at the top.
And then you take the product
or milk from a few males
and add that over those eggs.
At that point, nothing's happening.
We bring disinfected water with us
into the field.
You add some of that water and
give a quick mix.
And within three seconds, all those
eggs are going to be fertilized.
Once fertilized, the eggs are gonna
immediately start going through
what's called water hardening.
So they're going to swell to about
four times their original size and
the membrane that we
think of as like an egg shell is
going to seal up, the micropile
is going, to seal, up and
that egg will go from what's called
a green egg, they're very soft,
they are very fragile, to something
that's fairly robust.
That whole process takes about an
hour and a half during which we're
going to put them in coolers with
some red clay.
So, the red clay...
Helps to keep those eggs from
sticking to one another.
The fertilized eggs will produce
kind of a mucus layer and
in nature that's used so
they can kind of cling to,
you know, sticks or rocks or
something to just not be washed
around in, you know
the waves of wherever they are.
This red clay binds to that mucus
and instead of,
you know creating clumps where the
center of that clump wouldn't have
any oxygen.
They're more freely flowing or
freely moving within our
coolers.
Those coolers are typically put on
shore for that time just
because we're going to have to go
back and keep running more nets and
we don't want them bouncing around
on the boat as much as possible.
At the end of the day we gather up
all those coolers and come back here
to the hatchery.
So any questions that anything you'd
like me to talk about with?
Nope, I think that's good.
We got to go out in the field a few
times to see some of this, so all of
this kind of reinforces what we've
seen.
So we'll go down to the hatchery.
I've seen a minivan go by and I was
like, oh, maybe they're late. I
know, I know.
I know, I know.
I don't know if you noticed, I
looked over your shoulder to
saw the same thing.
Okay, so this right
here is the first stop for the eggs
once they come to the hatchery.
It's kind of a newer construction
within this building.
This is our quarantine area or
disinfection room.
All the spouts that you can see
hanging, those are going to be used
to temper the water in our cooler
to match the water temperature
in the hatch.
I should mention that we get
our We have two different water
sources here. So we have our warm
water source, which is Madeline
Lake, and our cold water source is
Clear Lake, and we're able to
combine those two to achieve
whatever temperature we'd like out
here. So that whole process
of tempering takes, you
know, 10-15 minutes depending on how
much of a temperature swing you're
trying to achieve.
After that, all that red clay needs
to get rinsed off, and any
small clumps of eggs that may have
formed need to be broken up.
You're gonna rinse with, you know,
fresh water and the eggs get
passed through a silk screen to
kind of break them apart, separate
them all.
After they've all been separated,
they're gonna go into an iodine
bath.
So the iodine solution
is going to kill
anything on the surface of the egg.
Remember that water hardening
already took place so nothing is
penetrating the egg, that's
That's a 10 minute process
during which we use this handy
little guy here.
So we call it a pig trough
around here, but this is a von Baer
trough.
And the way it works is
you line up a single file of eggs
down at the bottom of the trough and
count them.
We usually do that three times and
take an average and this is
the standardized size so it
allows us to extrapolate eggs
per quart.
Believe it or not every female fish
is a little different and there
seem to be some trends on some
lengths as far as egg size.
For walleye,
I don't know if this is even worth
showing, but they're the
smallest eggs we deal with.
So this number, you kind
of end up squinting at it a lot, but
it becomes important once we get out
here.
So that's typically one person's
job.
This was built so that it's a
separate space and
then someone else is out here
receiving those eggs and putting
them up in the jars.
This is a McDonald's type hatchery
jar. We have 1,080
of them just on this half
of the hatchery here.
Typically, we're very efficient
compared to when this was
constructed.
So for walleye, we typically using
maybe a dozen of these in a season.
The way this works is
you've got water running from this
Top Trough 24-7 down
each of these.
Spigots into this downspout.
So the water is actually entering
the jar from the bottom.
For walleye, we're going to be
putting about two quarts of eggs
per jar and
you want to create kind of
a gentle rolling of the eggs in
here. You don't want them flying all
over the place, but you also don't
them squashing down on one another.
Our biggest enemy in the
hatchery itself is fungus.
So, the more those eggs can
freely move The
less kind of dead spots that you
have in them, the more we can
control any fungal outbreak.
If we do notice fungus
starting to creep up in here, we can
add hydrogen peroxide to this top
trough and it kind of floats
the fungus right out for us.
Other than that, someone has
to come through here every day
and siphon out any dead
eggs or anything that just doesn't
look right.
During the height of the season,
that's an eight hour day.
Once those eggs are hatched,
they'll be down here.
Put this guy over the top just to
make sure no one swims out early, no
one gets swept away by the water.
Once we think they're ready to swim,
we'll darken all the windows in
here, we'll turn off all the lights,
except for these
lights over the top of whatever
battery we think is ready to be
swimming.
Fry, so young fish.
Are attracted to light in the same
way that bugs are.
So they're gonna swim their
way up out of these jars into
what was the drain trough,
but is now going to allow them to
swim underneath my feet
and swim themselves into these
holding tanks.
So it usually takes about 24 hours.
They'll do it all by themselves.
Sometimes you have to help a little
bit at the end, dump a couple of
jars out, but typically
they'll come in one morning and
they'll all be waiting for you over
here.
These holding tanks,
for walleye, they don't spend a lot
of time in them.
We like to get them into our ponds
pretty much as quickly as possible.
We can't feed them in here.
So it's important that
we just get them moving
and stock our pond as quickly as
we can.
Anything else on hatchery
stuff, anything glaringly
obvious that I missed?
No, I think that's good.
Okay, okay.
Do you want to go into the tour
room? Is that a waste of your time?
So, these are
a walleye for this year.
These aquarium fish are...
Oh, you're
fine. So, These are a Walleye
for the year. These are cram
fish are slightly
smaller than their counterparts are
in our ponds.
They were spawned out of Big
Arbor Vita Lake this year and
you know, they have
a couple weeks left to grow to
the large fingerling size.
Our biggest problems with
raising walleye in captivity,
as a schooling fish we can put
a few more of them into a pond than
we can with musky so they
can be stocked more densely into our
ponds.
They will also readily cannibalize
each other.
So any of them that seem to
be getting left behind in growth
rate will become food.
Also when we go to take fish out
of our ponds, we're drawing
the water down and
condensing them and also causing
some stress and that's another time
we will start seeing a lot of
cannibalism occurring.
The minnows in here, they're all
head minnows.
And we have to purchase them the
same way that a bait
shop does.
So prior to 2000,
crews here were able to go out and
capture food for our
fish.
Viral hemorrhagic septicemia was
noticed in Wisconsin
for the first time then, and since
then we've had to
purchase our minnows.
As far as water quality
goes for walleye in comparison
to muskie,
they are a little hardier when it
comes to pH
and dissolved oxygen.
They're very finicky with
temperature.
If the temperature is
not low enough, any sort of
handling of them just
doesn't end well.
So that's one of the reasons why we
have to wait until September to
harvest them up as a large
fingerling.
So they'll feed throughout the
time on these middles?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Bad amount of minnows will probably
be gone by Friday,
so a few days from now.
They are, they're
a lot more aggressive
than most people think.
A group of
wall-eyed this size.
Biomass wise, they will eat a lot
more than similar biomass
and musky at this stage of life
Trying to think
Does most of that happen in the
night?
Yeah, so if
we were to
be here right when we feed them
we'd see some action,
but typically these aquarium fish
get pretty spooked by the lights
and just us standing here, so
they're not really actively feeding.
As far as in our ponds go,
they move through
their supply of minnows
very Monday or Tuesday, there's
very few minnows left.
I think they eat throughout the
day in those cases.
Oh, so there's the masking over
here?
Yeah yeah just
lazily hanging out
Yeah, these metals don't seem to be
quite as spooked.
Exactly, yeah.
Yeah,
so at least it doesn't hit on the
fathead.
I think it did.
Yeah, I see it.
I think that is a really young
fathead.
Oh, I guess it
seems right.
Two sizes of minnow.
So we start with
what's called a grade 11 to 18.
It's the smallest minnow we can
purchase and then
we move on. Our grade 10 is smallest
and then when we move onto these
grade 11-18.
So this is big as
the food gets that we offer any
of our
It's one of
the things clip studies are trying
to do is try to do it better.
We do not know
So even right away after
the observer sat there under live
food?
I guess I can talk about that on
camera if you'd like to but
That's what I'm more curious about.
So, for
walleye, they
begin like eating zooplankton
here.
We inoculate our ponds
with zooplanking and we
fertilize them before any
walleye go in, so we're fertilizing
them with zooblankton.
Understanding how the fish
act in the wild versus
under lights in the...
Um,
I'd say at this size,
these guys are forced to be a little
closer to each other than they would
like to be.
Um, they will school, but
it's pretty tightly packed in there
right now.
Um, but as far as their general
habits, if you turn the lights off
and, you know,
leave for the night,
come out in the morning, they're
all...
Congregating in that tube.
They like finding structure like
that.
Right now,
with the lights on, they're probably
spending more
time, you know,
being anxious about that than they
would be if they were in a little
more turbid water.
And then they do react to
movement out here in
a way that I'm sure is not
actual.
But in our ponds,
which we'll go see, I'll show you
what I'm talking about, but
in that case I
think it's as natural as it can get
with the monoconfold.
...Minors, the plastics potentially
impacting the sex of the person.
Yep, yep.
I don't know how much I should say
on that.
We're not looking for that.
I'm just more curious.
We produce far
more female fish than
male fish.
That's what he said, he's never out
of those puns.
He's there's any of the X
puns are not lying.
And so they said that's one of the
negatives is they have a different
distribution of cells.
But yeah,
most of our line ponds were
created in the mid-90s,
and we used to use blue dirt ponds.
And I think you could line up
on a graph, you know,
the beginning of the line pond,
sex of the fish,
and at least they're correlated.
I will say it's better than the
reverse because
if we are producing all male fish,
it would be a much larger
problem.
So right here we've got five
of our extended
growth walleye ponds.
Each of these ponds is plastic
lined.
They're about an acre in size and
the deep end over by those catwalks
is about eight feet deep.
The shallow end over here is
three and a half to four feet deep,
it's about two million gallons of
water per pond.
Um, we won't
be able to see much while I spend
most of their time down at the
bottom, but it
also means they're more protected
from predators.
So on this side
of the road, we have, you know,
10 other ponds across the road.
But back here, we don't have to
worry too much about birds,
um...
The biggest issue would be otters
coming out of these wetlands, but
other than that, they're pretty safe
back here.
Twice a day, someone's going to come
by and do water
chemistry samples
on every pond at multiple depths.
So you're looking at dissolved
oxygen. My battery died.
Can we just, one
second.
No, you're fine. Um...
With these walleye ponds,
beginning of the year, they're going
to be utilized for our small
fingerling fish.
At that time,
our biggest issue with our
location here is proximity
to these wetlands and
toads.
So toads are going to come in, they
are going lay their eggs in
our ponds. Those eggs are going
hatch, those tadpoles are going swim
around.
And when it comes time to take those
small fingerlings walleye out of the
ponds we are counting
them by weight.
So if you can imagine a bucket
brigade of, you
know, five or six people bucketing
fish up to a distribution truck
and you've got a bucket that's an
unknown amount of tadpoles and an
unknown amount of fish at that point
it makes it hard.
So there's a lot of toad patrol that
goes on down here.
Got to get those guys out of the
pond.
For large fingerling fish We do
have some wading birds.
That might come by.
We're mostly worried about them
taking our minnows.
And to be honest with you,
their beaks are sharp enough to
puncture our liners.
So, you know, honk your horn at
them. Just try not to let them
feel welcome here.
But other than that,
the walleye are left, you now,
they're fed and they're left to do
what they need to do to grow.
As far as
the water chemistry goes,
if we notice any issues
After our water chemistry test,
the only thing we can really do is
run water.
So we've got right here,
our shallow fill is on,
flowing water through this pond.
At the catwalk,
there's a series of dam boards that
maintain the water level, and
we're actually flowing water over
the top of those, so the water is
flowing in one direction.
If water chemistry has started to
get...
Really worrisome.
We can turn on what's called our jet
fill, which is
how we can add the most amount
of water as quick
as possible.
And then there's a downspout to
add water directly below
the catwalk.
Typically, this
time of year, you might come here
and see all of
our ponds running at the shallow
fill, long hot sunny
days.
The pH is gonna start climbing up
and.
You know, associated dissolved
oxygen as well.
I should mention these ponds have
all been fertilized
before any fish got put into
them early on in the season.
So fertilization is,
you know, we use brewer's yeast and
ground alfalfa to
kickstart some zooplankton growth.
We typically leave one
pond without fish for a period of
time. We treat that as our bug pond.
Are able to take
zooplankton out of that pond and
inoculate the other ponds with that.
During the middle of our
growing season here,
once we're not worried
about zooplanking and all our
walleye are feeding on minnows,
we will add a blue pond
eye to these ponds.
That pond eye refracts more
sunlight than it allows to penetrate
and really helps us control
photosynthesis.
So without that, we would have
major allergy problems all the time.
At this time of year, we float, we
flowed, is that a word?
We put so much extra water into
these ponds at this point
that that pond die has
left anything
that leaves our hatchery
either the building itself or
the ponds, any of that water
does not get reused.
We're not a recirculating system.
Gets pumped out from that little
station behind you up
over the top of this hill to
a three acre retention pond and we
let mother nature filter our water
for us.
We're coming up pretty quickly here
to large fingerling harvest
so the way that works
is a little different than with the
small fingerling.
Instead of bucket brigading and
counting by weight we're
able to use a fish loader
which allows us to
basically just add fish with
no water to our distribution truck
so at that stage
we're counting those fish by water
displacement.
It's a pretty nice system.
At the bottom of each of these ponds
is what's called a catch kettle.
If think of a U-shaped
concrete structure, if I was
standing in it the water level would
be right above my knee and
you're able to put the
intake of that fish loader down
into that catch kettle.
Sucks fish and water up to
a hopper where there's a series of
grates that the fish kind of bounce
along and the water falls right
back into the pond and just fish
once again are loaded onto the
truck.
For that it's kind of an all hands
on deck operation so you've got
multiple people in the pond kind
of herding the fish towards that
catch kettle, you got someone
manning the hopper because
occasionally you have to help those
fish keep bouncing along That was
great.
Of course, you have to have drivers
for the distribution trucks and
people monitoring the water level
in those trucks.
For stocking fish,
we use two B-class
semi trucks and one
F450 that usually
gets us by. Sometimes we have to put
a tank on a smaller pickup truck.
We'll salt the water.
So you're adding salt to the
distribution truck water and that
helps calm the fish and we're able
to put much
more on board than
otherwise.
So you'll be able to leave here with
sometimes enough
fish that you won't have to send a
second truck to that lake.
I'm trying to think of what else for
stocking.
We service predominantly
the upper Wisconsin river
strain of walleye.
At this time we also
have some extended growth
walleye from the upper Chippewa
River strain.
Those were given to us by spooner,
the Hatcheryon spooner.
So for our purposes we're
spawning our own
upper Wisconsin fish.
Those fish, our upper Wisconsin,
fish might be stocked anywhere
from Lockview to Zaire
down to Lake Dubay
in Stevens Point.
Our upper chipfish, it's kind of
all up to Spooner where they'd like
them, but you know think like
Yellow River area, something
like that.
So I always have
people on these tours ask me,
you know, the genetics of these fish
and the state of Wisconsin
doesn't
discriminate between lake to lake
basis, it' all by watershed.
There's the Chippewa up over
Wisconsin, Green Bay,
and is the Fox considered
different or is that part of the
Green Bay?
I think it's up to a certain
impoundment it's considered Green
Bay, but then
past that I think it's its own
watershed as it were.
How many typically come through
here?
Fish wise?
Yeah. So this year,
I think we've got 140,
I'd have to really double check my
numbers but so maybe,
okay don't include this, it's like
140,000
large fingerlings
and
about maybe half again as much
for the smalls.
We can produce quite a few smalls
the reason we
even worry about small
fingerling people always ask
aren't you just feeding
other fish with those they're very
small two or three inches maybe
the lakes that those get put into
have been shown to be receptive to
them and they're very
cheap to make.
So, you know, large fingerling
walleye. There's a few dollars for
the state to produce, whereas
the smalls are cents.
I can get you some numbers before
we're done.
One of the other people
talked about by the time the
number that survived from the eggs
to this to an actual
trophy fish, it could be hundreds
of dollars for that one fish.
Hundreds of dollars and a
very low percent chance too.
So most of our lakes around
here, just three to five
years before that fish is gonna be
15 inches.
And the closer they get to like a
magical 30 inch mark,
more slowly they're gonna grow.
Females especially will grow
quickly in the beginning and then
they start putting a lot of energy
into making eggs every year.
So this slows down their growth
rate.
So when someone asks, is
it worth it,
is there are researches that say
we shouldn't be putting effort into
stocking. We should put effort into
making the lakes more habitable, or
at least when we stock only stock
in the lakes that we know will
actually sustain a population.
Yeah so that's two different schools
of thought there. You've got people
who think that
kind of return everything to nature
and if you were
to do that there's quite a few lakes
in northern Wisconsin that would
have no walleye.
The only reason they have walleye in
the first place is because of
the hatchery system.
We are you know we've been around
since 1901
and only the fourth
oldest hatchery in the state
so it's a legacy that's
been going on for quite some time.
As far as supplemental stocking
goes, if you're going to supplement
an already naturally
reproducing population,
that has been shown to be...
Not as productive.
What we do a lot here
is our
biologists will identify lakes with
declining natural reproduction,
maybe zero natural
reproduction.
And if you start looking at
those lakes, you're talking about
really high-dollar
tourist attractions that
people wouldn't want go to if they
weren't walleyeing them and
then there's some lakes that managed
more as a trophy fishery
and you know supplemental
stocking along the way might be
helpful for them but
generally speaking
if
you were to eliminate you
know rearing of walleye and
stocking of wall I I
think the major outcome is suddenly
there'll be
much fewer walleye destinations
in the state especially
you know if you
look at when this place started
focused on black bass that
was what people were wanting
to catch.
They started bringing walleye all
over the state and
that became you know
why people wanted to come to Johnson
so.
It's interesting that that
history, like Wisconsin in
many ways, literally grew its
walleye tradition.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, so
funny like anecdotal stuff with
musky.
Any, you know, world record musky
back in the 20s and 30s
seemed to be caught by
someone who owned a bar or tavern.
Walleye kind of started following
suit with that and
people were advertising, you'll
come to my resort we have
you know swingers of
walleye you can come catch.
The state realized pretty quickly
they had to support that effort.
And because of
that, you've got two
of the world's
largest walleye
hatcheries in northern Wisconsin
with Austin Spooner.
As far as, you know.
Kind of a self-fulfilling
prophecy in a way you
put the money and time into it and
people will enjoy it.
So to say that it's a waste
of time depends on what
you're trying to get out of it.
Would it be awesome if we could
move to
all habitat protection,
development, rehabilitation?
Sure, I've yet to
see anything that says that that's
100% successful.
You look at even some
fairly recent studies on creating
habitat for walleye spawning.
They don't seem to have much
promise.
So we seem to reach
the point with walleye
in particular where,
and you can talk
to a biologist who knows a lot more
about this than I do,
but there's lakes of greatest
concern when it comes to walleye
that despite many
efforts to Kickstart
natural reproduction don't seem to
be responding to those and
therefore Facilities
like ours are going to have to be
responsible to keep walleye in them
Most people don't know that walleye
are a river fish.
Yeah, yeah.
So how many of the lakes up here
that people became Walleye
destinations like were
originally stocked, maybe not by the
state, but like Walleye weren't
native there to begin with.
It's hard to say, so until
the modern genetics they'd
be really hard to pin down
a number of lakes.
You can pretty safely say that,
you know, these small
acreage landlocked lakes
with, you
know, poor spawning
habitat to begin with, probably
you were never meant to have walleye
in them. Just because they can
naturally reproduce somewhere
doesn't mean that they belong
there as it were they
of course belong there now if you
ask people but
You know a lot of
larger deep water
clear water lakes
probably have a wildlife population
in them to begin with but
you go in
back in the 1800s there were people
just filling up a milk
jug of fry and bring
it wherever they wanted.
So it's one of the reasons we work
so hard to maintain the
genetic integrity of our fish
leaving here.
We're trying to avoid obviously
creating what's known as a hatchery
strain of fish where we're
breeding, spawning the same fish
again over and over.
But also there's a reason why
they're genetically diverse and
maintaining that seems to help with
natural reproduction as well.
What would happen if the
state stopped doing this like in
there were no more walleye would
people just move on to something
else and
Another fish would take its spot in
the ecosystem, but sure what would
be lost
Sure, ecosystem
wise, most places
would be fine.
There's other fish species that
would fill that niche.
I guess I've talked to plenty of
people. I pull up in a truck
to a boat launch
and I go and I start getting
ready to dump fish off.
And I have plenty of of people ask
me, hey, what do you have in there?
What are you bringing to us?
Walleye, thank you.
No one is mad that we're putting
walleye into the lakes.
If I were to say, I've got to load a
smallmouth bass, I'd get run
out of there in some places.
So smallmouth Bass,
it's a public opinion matter.
They think it's major competition
for walleye.
Maybe it is, maybe it's not.
I think it really depends on the
system you're talking about.
I thought it was largemouth bass
that were actually more competitive
than smallmouths before habitat.
It is.
It is, yeah.
But you tell that to a
60-year-old with a $200,000
boat, they don't want to hear it.
So I think the
fallout from not having any walleye
on the landscape,
it'd be more,
you'd see it more with how people
use the resource.
You wouldn't necessarily see
major changes to the
ecosystem. I'm sure there'd be some,
but
be a lot less money spent on,
you know, coming here with
your boat from Illinois.
We have a lot of less time spent on
the water certain
times of the year.
You gotta think spring walleye
is a big deal, ice fishing is a deal
for walleye.
So just be less tourism
dollars coming in the winter, coming
in in the spring.
So people might gravitate more
towards You know, muskie
fishing in the fall for that reason.
Bass fishing has kind of taken a
foothold in Wisconsin and it's an
important driver for
tourism, but
I don't personally think anything's
going to replace walleye.
There's just something different
about it, right?
Yeah, yeah, and it's part of
the culture in a way that
it's hard to sell a
certain demographic of people on
bass or muskie,
you know, both of which have become
a very catch-and-release-oriented
species.
People like keeping a few walleye a
year. Some people keep more than
that. People like keepin' a few
while you're having a fish fry.
It just wouldn't be their vacation
in Wisconsin without it, honestly.
People aren't coming to take tours
here to watch the smallmouth or a
bluegill.
Right right no and there's
we have two types of people here we
have the musky diehards
and the people who
want to learn more about walleye
there's really no one
who's coming on a tour
taking time out of their day just
to learn about our white sucker
production or just to look
at our nice 1933 buildings
it's you know people love these
fish and you know
I think with good reason, but...
I'm not going to say that
if this was a largemouth
bass hatchery, we wouldn't
have any visitors.
It's not quite that far,
but there's a certain type of person
who comes
here in the first place.
So what's it like for you when you
get to actually see the full cycle
of this and bring them to the lake
and let them go?
I like it a lot.
So I start the year on a
spawning crew.
You know, get out of here and
go do something hands on.
Very enjoyable.
I am starting to really enjoy
working with the ponds more as I've
been here longer.
The full I have
pictures on my phone of here are
eggs that we spawn and here are fish
leaving my truck and it's
fun.
I feel like you have a little bit of
stake in the game, a little
ownership of the resource in a way,
but yeah,
I really enjoy it.
And do you catch and release while
away or what's your fishing
technique?
Yeah, um...
No, he was a genus
I mostly bass fish in the
summertime, I don't really like
eating fish unless
it's something I caught through
the ice, personal preference,
but I like walleye fishing in the
wintertime.
Yeah that makes sense.
I know there's a lot of people that,
especially summer, they won't touch
a crappie.
Yeah, that too, yeah.
I think that covers what we wanted
out of this, this was great, can I
get you to say and spell your name
and give your title, just so I have
it correct? Sure.
So I'm Ryan Flaherty, that's
R-Y-A-N-F-L-A
H-E-R-T-Y,
and I'm a fisheries technician
advanced at Ardhamkey Fritch
Hatchery.
Excellent. Thank you so much.
You're welcome. Really appreciate
it.
So this building here with
the kind of sliding garage door
facing us, that's full of pike nets.
Oh, the big pilliated.
Yeah, so when
we use those pike nets,
they're one time used per season.
So we put a, let's say we're
walleye spawning and big arborvita,
then that net will get hung back
behind those boats.
We'll get all fresh nets to go to
our sucker lakes.