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It's almost like oh that was like an aspirational thing like yeah maybe we'll get into some
wildlife.
You can go catch something else yeah you start doing the math on that it's a lot of
time a lot of money now with you know the way electronics and all that's going yeah
yeah and then after the sky just throw them back oh I know I know and I do the quial surveys
in the winter and it's nice to meet people who are just catching release but for our
purposes it's also nice to see some fish up on the ice so no I know I know in some places
you know we stock at a rate of you know seven or nine expecting it's all even out at three
you know so people look at our stocking or portion they think oh this is going to be
a good one and it's a reason we put so many fish in sometimes yeah so he's got a stocking
okay okay that is interesting okay we were we've done a lot up on Namakagan and reading
some of the reports there like they used to be it like over nine yeah yeah yeah and 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 okay you remember like yeah you see 50 deer day kind of thing right
well that was the peak never come back yep that's a good old days yeah like that's not
coming back and anyone who thinks it is like but they played in the DNR like oh there's
no right all the wolves yeah they were way over pop down in like the south of here used
to be thought of is just a world-class walleye destination and for trophy size fish and 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 stock them but you got to tell people you know like seven
eight years you know you're tan and stained like flowages and whatever so well just even
going over to Marinette and into the Bay 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 there's no I'm good to go and you guys are all right
yeah so our empty state fish hatchery founded in 1901 there's originally called the Monocua
fish hatchery and then the name changed to the Woodruff fish hatchery the reason for
our location here we're pretty centrally located amongst a lot of like 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
our small fingering walleye they go they will get put out into lakes around memorial day
or large fingering 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 empty 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 so 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 going to set our nets I should mention that we do not take any adult
fish back to the hatchery it's only going to be fertilize eggs coming here so ice is
off the lake we have open water we're going to put boats on and for walleye we're typically
looking for pea size 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 going to 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 to
start seeing looks like salt and pepper at the bottom of the jar those are their eyes
so their eyes are going to form anything that's not showing this sign here this eye up we're
going to 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 1 percent allow that's just ensure water movement kind of making it so
that you know the sperm can never meet the egg so those eggs are going to sit and do
their thing they're going to 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 sack 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 can let
them absorb their yolk sack we try not to bother them too much during this timeframe once that's
been absorbed they're going to swim out of the 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 fingering wall I hear 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 so we interacted with this fish once before but 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 on Labor Day do you want me to talk about mosquito you can
run a little bit through yeah okay so that different it's only just the timeframe difference
and the spawning habitat I guess I can talk about it here so this is what's called a fight
net the fight net consists of basically three main components you've got what I'm holding on to
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 the 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 going to 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 okay sure
so once they're led into these frames this portion of netting I'm talking on here is sewn
shut for this display net but they're going to 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 want to 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 to go
lift all of our nets so we're going to 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 going to get put on board our boat in holding tanks typically
with walleye you're going to be spawning at the net so you're going to gather fish on board you're
going to you know take here 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 going to go through what's called the
dry spawning method so picture like a glass or a plastic salad bowl you're going to express the
eggs for multiple females into that how is that people ask you know how hard 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
where is it okay so you fill up that salad bowl leaving some room at the top and then you take
the product or melt 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
going to 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 is like an egg shell
is going to seal up the micro pile is going to seal up and that egg will go from what's called a
green egg they're very soft they're 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 um there's 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 um those coolers are typically put on shore for that time just because
we're gonna have to go back and keep running more nuts 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 no I think
that's good we we got to go out in the field a few times to see so all this kind of reinforces
what I've seen okay okay awesome so we'll go down to the hatchery
I've seen a mini van go by and I was like oh maybe the I know I know I don't know if you notice 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 spots 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 hatchery 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 the 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 so
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're 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 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 Bayer 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 a
standardized size so it allows us to extrapolate eggs for court believe it or not every female
fish is a little different and there seem to be some trends on some lakes as far as eggs size
for walleye i don't know if this is even worse showing but um they're the smallest eggs we deal
with so this number you kind of end up squinting at a line but it becomes important once we get
out here so that's typically one person's job they're this this was built so that it's a separate
space and then someone else is out here receiving those eggs and putting them up into jars
so
this is a McDonald's type hatchery jar we have a thousand and eighty of them just on this
half of the hatchery here typically we're we're very efficient compared to when this was
constructed so for walleye we're typically using maybe a dozen of these in a season the way this
works is you got water running from this top trough 24 seven 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 want 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 attached will 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 um fry so young fish are attracted
to light in the same way that bugs are so they're going to 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 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 jars out but typically
they'll come in one morning and they'll all be waiting for you over here um 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 um you can't feed them in here so it's important that we just get them
moving and stock our ponds as quickly as we can so anything else on hatchery stuff anything
with glaringly obvious that i missed okay okay um do you want to go into the tour room is that
i'm wasting your time oh no see so these are a walleye for this year um they these aquarium fish
are oh you're fine so these are a walleye for this year um these aquarium fish are slightly
smaller than their counterparts that are in our ponds uh they were spawned out of big arbor
right of lake this year and you know they have a couple weeks left to grow to the large fingering
size our biggest problems with raising walleye and captivity uh 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 uh 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 you know cannibalism occurring um the minnows in here they're all fat head minnows
and we have to purchase them the same way that bait shop does so prior to 2000
crews here were able to go out and capture food for our fish um viral hemorrhagic septosemia was
noticed in wisconsin for the first time then and since then we've had to you know purchase our minnows
um as far as water quality goes for walleye and comparison to musky 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 treasureling
and so they'll feed throughout the time on these minnows yeah yeah um that 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 uh a group of walleye this size will you know biomass wise they'll eat a lot more than
similar biomass of musky at this stage of life um trying to think
does most of that happen in the night yeah so uh if we were to be here right when we feed them
we see some action but typically these aquarium fish get pretty spooked by
the lights and there's us standing here so they're not really actively feeding um as far as in our
ponds go um they move through their supply of minnows very quickly so we typically get a
minnows shipment on friday and by monday or tuesday there's very few minnows left i think they eat
throughout the day in those cases so
oh so these are musky over here yeah yeah they're lazily hanging out
yeah these minnows don't seem to be quite spooked exactly yeah
yeah
yeah so we said i'm hit on the fathead um i think they're like straight on the side
yeah i see it i think that it is a really young fathead oh so i guess it is the same straight
so we hit uh two sizes of minnows so we start with um it's called a grade 11 to 18 it's the smallest
minnow we can purchase and then we move on a grade 10 is smallest and then we move on to these
grade 11 to 18 so this is as big as the food gets that we offer any of our minnows versus
palimones yeah sure yeah we do not know um they're all
yeah um i guess i can talk about that on camera if you'd like to but um i'm more curious
oh yeah um so for wal i think they begin like eating zooplankton here um we inoculate our ponds
with zooplankton and we fertilize them before any wal i go in so we're fertilizing them with
grass tanning how the fish act in the wild versus under lights in the
yeah um i'd say this size these guys are forces 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 they turn the lights off and you know leave for the night
you come in in the morning they're all congregating in that too they like
private structure like that um right now with the lights on they're probably spending
more time you know being anxious about that then they would be if they're in a little more
water um and then they do react to movement out here in a way that i'm sure is not natural
but um in our ponds which we'll see i'll show you what i'm talking about but um in that case i
think it's as natural as you can get with the amount of control. The miners um the plastics
potentially impacting the sex so yes yep um
i don't know how much i should say on that. We're not looking for that okay i'm just more
curious. We produce uh far more female fish than male fish.
That's what he said is that we're having these ponds. Yeah. These theirs any of the exponents are not
high. Okay. And so they said that's one thing they know is that they have different distributions.
Yeah yeah um most of our line ponds were created in the mid 90s and we used to use their ponds
and i think you could line up on a graph you know the beginning of the line pond
sex of the fish at least they're correlated. Yeah
I will say it's better than the reverse because if we are producing all male fish
it would be much longer than all of them.
Good all right so right here we've got five of our turtle. Yeah we're going to shoot.
So five of our extended growth walleye ponds each of these ponds is plastic line
they're about an acre in size and the deep end over by those catwalks is about eight feet deep
shallow and 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 ten other ponds across the road but back here we don't have to worry too much about
birds um you know the biggest issue would be otters coming out of these wetlands but other
than that they're pretty safe back here um twice a day someone was going to come by and do water
chemistry samples on every pond and multiple depths so you're looking at dissolved oxygen.
My battery died because we just uh my mic is one second. Oh you're from um so with these
walleye ponds um 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 uh is proximity to these wetlands and
toads so toads are going to come in they're going to lay their eggs in our ponds those eggs
are going to hatch those tadpoles are going to swim around and when it comes time to take those
small fingerling walleye out of the ponds um we are counting them by weight so if you can imagine
a bucket brigade uh 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 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 um for large fingerling fish we do have some waiting 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 hug your horn at them just try not to let them feel welcome
here but um other than that walleye are left you know they're fed and they're left to do what they
need to do to grow um 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 uh shallow fill
is on uh flowing water through this pond at the catwalk um 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 um if water chemistry is starting to get you know really worrisome we can turn on
what's called our jet fill which is how we can add the most amount of water the you know quick as
possible and then there's a downspout to add water you know directly below the catwalk uh typically
you know this time of year you might come here and see all of our ponds running at the shallow
fill uh long hot sunny days the pH is going to start climbing up and you know associated uh
dissolved oxygen as well um i should mention these ponds have all been fertilized
uh before any fish got put into them early on in the season so fertilization is
um 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
we're able to take zooplankton out of that pond and inoculate the other ponds with that
um during the middle of our growing season here once we're not worried about zooplankton and all
our walleye are feeding on minnows we will add a blue pondi to these ponds um that pondi refracts
more sunlight than it allows to penetrate and really helps us control photosynthesis so without
that we would have major algae problems all the time um 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 pondi
has left um anything that leaves our hatchery either the building itself or the ponds any of
that water uh 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 um we're coming up pretty quickly here to large fingering
harvest so the way that works it's a little different than with the small fingering um
instead of bucket brigading and counting by weight we're able to use a fish loader
um which allows us to basically just add fish with no water to our distribution truck
so in that stage we're counting those fish by water displacement um 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
um for that it's kind of an all hands on deck operation so you've got multiple people in the
pond kind of hurting the fish towards that catch kettle uh you've got someone manning the hopper
because occasionally you have to help those fish keep bouncing along those grates and of course you
have to have drivers for the distribution trucks and people monitoring the water level in those
trucks um for stocking fish we we use two you know B-class semi-trucks and one F450 that usually
gets us by sometimes we have to put a tank on a smaller pickup truck um well salt the water so
you're adding salt to the distribution truck water that helps calm the fish and we're able to put
much more you know on board than otherwise so they're able to leave here with sometimes
you know enough fish that you won't have to send a second truck to that lake
I kind of think what else for stocking so
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 hatchery and spooners so for our purposes we're spawning our own upper Wisconsin
fish um those fish are with upper Wisconsin fish might be stocked anywhere from locket is
air down to lake du Bay and Stevens Point um our upper chip fish it's kind of all up to spooner
where they'd like them but you know think like a yellow river area something like that so
I always have people on these tours ask me you know the genetics of these fish and stay in
Wisconsin doesn't discriminate between lake to lake basis it's all by watershed so yeah
Chippewa upper Wisconsin green bay and is the fox considered different for that part of the
green bay and I think it's up to a certain impoundment it's considered green bay
um but then past that I think it's its own watershed as it were okay
so how many typically come through here fish wise yeah um so this year I think we've got 140
I'd have to really double check my numbers but so maybe
it's okay don't include this it's like 140 000 um 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 um the lakes that those get
put into them show them to be receptive to them and they're very cheap to make so
the you know large fingerling walleye is a few dollars for the state to produce whereas the
smalls is sense so I can get you some numbers before we're done but that it one of the other
people have talked about like by the time the number that survived from the egg for this to like
an actual trophy fish oh it could be hundreds of dollars for that one fish yes hundreds of dollars
and a very low percent chance too so um most of our lakes around here this three to five years
before that fish is going to be 15 inches and the closer they get to like a magical 30 inch mark
it was you know more slowly they're going to grow uh females especially
will grow quickly in the beginning and then uh they start putting a lot of energy into making eggs
every year so this slows down their growth right so when someone asks is it worth it
like is it worth it is there our research is this a you know we should be putting effort into
stocking we should put effort into making the lakes more habitable or at least when we stop only
stocking the lakes that we know will actually sustain the population yeah so that's two different
schools of thought there you've got people who think that uh 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
law the only reason they have walleye in the first place is because of the hatchery system uh we are
you know we've been around since 1901 and only the fourth oldest hatchery in the state so it's
a legacy it's been going on for quite some time um as far as supplemental stocking goes if you're
going to supplement an already uh naturally reproducing population that has been shown to be
you know not as productive um what we do a lot here is um 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 you know really high dollar uh tourist attractions that people wouldn't
want to go to if they weren't walleye in them um and then there's some lakes that are managed more
as a trophy fishery and you know supplemental stocking along the way might be helpful for them
but um generally speaking if you were to eliminate you know rearing of walleye and stocking of walleye
I think the major outcome is suddenly the view you know much fewer walleye destinations in the
state um especially you know if you look at when this place started focused on black bass that was
what people were wanting to catch um they started bringing walleye all over the state
and that became you know why people wanted to come to Wisconsin so it's interesting that that
that history like Wisconsin in many ways literally grew it's walleye traditional yeah yeah so um
funny like anecdotal stuff with musky any you know world record musky
back in the 20s and 30s seem to be caught by someone who owned a bar or tavern um walleye kind
of started following suit with that and people were advertising you know come to my resort we have
you know swingers of walleye you can come catch um the state realized pretty quickly they had to
support that effort and you know because of that we've got you know two of the world's largest
you know walleye hatcheries in northern Wisconsin with awesome spooner
I think 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 um would it be awesome if we could move to
all habitat protection development rehabilitation sure have you yet to see anything that says that
that's a hundred percent successful you look at even you know some fairly recent studies on
creating habitat for walleye spawning they don't seem to have much promise so
so we seem to have reached a point with walleye in particular where um and you can talk to
biologists 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 so most people don't know that walleye are a river push yeah yeah so how many
of the lakes up here that people like became walleye destinations like were originally stocked
maybe not by the steve but like walleye weren't native there to be kidding it's hard to say so
until the modern genetics um they'd be really hard to pin down a number of lakes um even 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 walleye population in them to begin with but you know in back of the 1800s
there were people just filling up a milk jug of fry and bringing 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 um 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 people just
move on to something else and just another fish would take its spot in the ecosystem but sure what
would be lost sure um ecosystem wise most places would be fine there's other fish species that
would fill that niche um 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 people asking
hey what do you have in there what do you bring into us walleye thank you no one is mad that we're
putting walleye into the lakes um 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 um it's a public opinion matter they think
it's a major competition for walleye maybe it is maybe it's not I think it really depends on
the system you're talking about it was largemouth bass that were actually more competitive
yes it is yeah but you tell them tell that to a 60 year old with a 200 000 boat um they don't
want to hear it so um I think the fallout from not having any walleye on the landscape it'd be more
uh 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 uh you'd be a lot less money spent on
you know coming here with your boat from Illinois um we a lot less time spent on the water
a certain times of the year um you got to think spring walleye is a big deal ice fishing is a big
deal for walleye so it just be less tourism dollars coming in the winter coming in the spring
so people might gravitate more towards you know musky fishing in the fall for that reason or
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 is it just something
different about it 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 musky you know both of which have become a very
catch and release oriented species um people like keeping a few walleye a year some people keep
more than that people like keeping a few walleye or having a fish fry um you know there's just
wouldn't be their vacation in Wisconsin without it honestly well people aren't coming to take
tours here to watch a small mouth or a move it right right no and there's you we have two
types of people here we have the musky diehards and the people who want to learn more about walleye
uh 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 um I'm not going to say that if this was a
large mouth bass pantry we wouldn't have any visitors it's I'm you know it's not quite that far but
it's a certain type of person um who comes here in the first place so what's it like for you when
you get to actually like see the full cycle of this and bring them to a lake and let them go
I like it a lot uh so I start the year on a spawning crew um 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 um 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 you know stake in the
game a little ownership of the resource in a way but uh yeah I really enjoy it and do you
catch him with a small ai what's your fishing technique yeah um
you know people but generous I uh I mostly bass fish in the summer time I don't really like
eating fish unless it's uh something I caught through the ice it's personal preference but I
like walleye fishing in the winter time okay yeah yeah I know there's a lot of people that like
especially summer they won't touch a crappie yeah that too yeah all right I think that covers
what we wanted out of this this was great okay thank you to say and spell your name and give
your title just so I had to correct sure yeah so I'm Ryan Flaherty that's ryamflahtyy and i'm a
fishery use technician advanced at R&P fish hatchery excellent thank you so much you're welcome I really
appreciate it yeah
so
So
You
You
So this building here with the kind of sliding garage door facing us that's full of fight
Yeah, so when we use those spike nets, they're only one time used per season. So we put a, let's say, we're walleye spawning and big are vibrato, then that that net will get hung back behind those boats will get all fresh nets to go to our sucker lakes.