Increased perch pop/L. Michigin

[Lee Borgersen]

   Larger number of perch found in Lake Michigan           :fishing2:got one.....                                me to.....
       
 
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Young-of-the-year yellow perch are shown during a Lake Michigan fish assessment. The Department of Natural Resources has found a surprise increase of young perch in the Racine waters of Lake Michigan this summer.

Aug. 28, 2015

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Racine — Cheryl Masterson and Dave Schindelholz dragged the 25-foot net out of Lake Michigan and up the sandy shore of North Beach.

The seine was clearly laden with cargo.

But was it filled only with cladophera, the algae that plagues many Lake Michigan beaches in summer? Or was there also a fin component?

And more specifically, were there any small, vertically-striped fish in the catch?

As the Department of Natural Resources fisheries technicians folded open the net on Wednesday, the answer became abundantly clear.

More than a thousand tiny fish shimmered and flopped on the sand, including more than a hundred greenish-silvery fish with dark bars on their flanks: yellow perch.

"I've never seen so many (perch)," said Masterson, who has participated in the DNR's beach seining project most years since 1999. "This is amazing."

Yes, even scientists get excited when an increasingly rare and extremely valuable native species shows up in unexpectedly high numbers.

Masterson, Schindelholz and DNR fisheries biologist Pradeep Hirethota were conducting the agency's annual young-of-the-year yellow perch assessment.

The work involves beach seining at more than a dozen sites from Kenosha to Sheboygan.

The one seine haul on Wednesday in Racine waters yielded 119 young-of-the-year yellow perch, more than the total of 100 hauls over the last four years in Wisconsin waters of Lake Michigan.

The summer of 2015 appears to have produced a very good hatch of yellow perch in the lake's southern basin.

Angler optimism is being fortified by reports in recent weeks from Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana. Many anglers have seen small perch in the stomachs of trout and salmon.

"I found 21 perch in one chinook salmon," said John Richardson of Waukegon, Ill. "I think there must be a lot of young perch out there."

Earlier this month, researchers with Ball State University found about 2,000 young-of-the-year yellow perch per net hour during its annual trawling assessment in southern Lake Michigan, highest since the late 1980s.

"It's a hopeful sign," said Thomas Lauer, professor of biology and director of the Aquatic Biology and Fisheries Center at Ball State in Muncie, Ind.

From 2010 through 2014, Lauer and his BSU colleagues found essentially no young-of-the-year perch.

Throughout most of the 20th century the perch supported a commercial fishing industry, fueled Friday night fish fries and formed a popular sport fishery.

But the Lake Michigan yellow perch population began to crash in mid-1990s due to a lack of recruitment, or survival of young fish. Most researchers believe the decline is linked to zebra and quagga mussels, invasive species which filter plankton from the lake and have altered the food web.

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