03-28-2016, 02:13 PM
[#0000FF]Sent a request to Chris Penne of DWR to provide an update on their Willard walleye spawning efforts and their progress on taking crappies for Red Fleet. This is his response for those who have an interest:
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Things are going very well. These estimates are a few days old and will be subject to change, but as last Friday (3/25) we have taken about 10 million eggs from about 148 fish. Most of the eggs have been pressure treated to produce batches of sterile fish. Nearly 1 million of those eggs are fertile and will be for Willard.
Some things to note with these numbers: 1) there will obviously be some mortality with these eggs, particularly the pressure treated eggs, so the number of fry produced will be lower than the number of eggs. How much lower, I can't say for sure. 2) Its likely that not all the sterile fry produced will be used in Utah. Red Fleet needs 100% sterile walleye fry because of its connection to the Colorado River and the endangered fishes found there, but not all batches produced will be 100% sterile. Learning from other states like Colorado, it's fairly common for the pressure treatment to produce 98% and 99% sterile batches of walleye fry. Getting 100% sterile batches of fish is certainly doable, but we anticipate having several batches that won't meet that 100% requirement. Where these "extra" fish will go, I'm not sure, but right now it looks like some of our administrators are looking at sending them to another state as like Idaho as they apparently have expressed interested in these mostly sterile fish. As I may have mentioned before, most of the states trade fish or help each other out. Trades and assistance are how we got our walleye to stock in Willard the past few years, as Colorado had extra fish they provided us, so trading or providing fish to Idaho would be a good thing as it gives us some credit with them.
We've already met our target of collecting 8 million eggs, so we may wrap our spawning soon. We'll be having a meeting about that this topic in the coming week and will make our decision based on egg survival, how many 100% sterile batches of fish are produced, and whether or not we want more experience producing the fry this year.
The crappie transfer will take place in a few weeks. This might be a good moment too for me to pass on that I encourage anglers to get out and take advantage of the crappie fishing this year as it may be the last really good one for a few more years. As I’ve heard you mention before, panfish like crappie are influenced less by anglers (harvest) and more by environmental conditions like water levels, temp, etc. This is quite true and to illustrate this, the great fishing the past few years appears to be the result of good year classes produced when the water was up in 2011 and 2012. On that same note, those year classes produced during the drought years aren't present in nearly the numbers as those strong year classes from the good water years. Our netting shows there are still plenty of crappie to keep the population going, but I don't think we'll see another population boom until the water levels come up and all that new brush that's been developing along the shoreline gets submerged.
I'm sure I may start taking heat from anglers for moving fish when I'm predicting their population is going to go down, but this is all relative and there are plenty of crappie in Willard, whose population will fluctuate with water levels regardless of what harvest is or how many fish we transfer. The last creel survey we conducted at Willard in 2010 estimated annual crappie harvest in the thousands, while what we are moving will be in the hundreds, so we're only moving a fraction of the annual harvest. Further, as you suggested, we don’t have any work scheduled on Pineview this year, this is the most efficient use of our time.
Yep, last Monday we had decided to pause our netting efforts due to the predicted winds on Monday and Tuesday. Those winds didn’t really pan out on Monday, but we were glad we didn’t have to work nets on Tuesday when the storm hit.
Sorry for the novel. Guess there’s a lot of if's and buts to this work that I figured they needed some explanation.
Chris
[signature]
[/#0000FF]
Things are going very well. These estimates are a few days old and will be subject to change, but as last Friday (3/25) we have taken about 10 million eggs from about 148 fish. Most of the eggs have been pressure treated to produce batches of sterile fish. Nearly 1 million of those eggs are fertile and will be for Willard.
Some things to note with these numbers: 1) there will obviously be some mortality with these eggs, particularly the pressure treated eggs, so the number of fry produced will be lower than the number of eggs. How much lower, I can't say for sure. 2) Its likely that not all the sterile fry produced will be used in Utah. Red Fleet needs 100% sterile walleye fry because of its connection to the Colorado River and the endangered fishes found there, but not all batches produced will be 100% sterile. Learning from other states like Colorado, it's fairly common for the pressure treatment to produce 98% and 99% sterile batches of walleye fry. Getting 100% sterile batches of fish is certainly doable, but we anticipate having several batches that won't meet that 100% requirement. Where these "extra" fish will go, I'm not sure, but right now it looks like some of our administrators are looking at sending them to another state as like Idaho as they apparently have expressed interested in these mostly sterile fish. As I may have mentioned before, most of the states trade fish or help each other out. Trades and assistance are how we got our walleye to stock in Willard the past few years, as Colorado had extra fish they provided us, so trading or providing fish to Idaho would be a good thing as it gives us some credit with them.
We've already met our target of collecting 8 million eggs, so we may wrap our spawning soon. We'll be having a meeting about that this topic in the coming week and will make our decision based on egg survival, how many 100% sterile batches of fish are produced, and whether or not we want more experience producing the fry this year.
The crappie transfer will take place in a few weeks. This might be a good moment too for me to pass on that I encourage anglers to get out and take advantage of the crappie fishing this year as it may be the last really good one for a few more years. As I’ve heard you mention before, panfish like crappie are influenced less by anglers (harvest) and more by environmental conditions like water levels, temp, etc. This is quite true and to illustrate this, the great fishing the past few years appears to be the result of good year classes produced when the water was up in 2011 and 2012. On that same note, those year classes produced during the drought years aren't present in nearly the numbers as those strong year classes from the good water years. Our netting shows there are still plenty of crappie to keep the population going, but I don't think we'll see another population boom until the water levels come up and all that new brush that's been developing along the shoreline gets submerged.
I'm sure I may start taking heat from anglers for moving fish when I'm predicting their population is going to go down, but this is all relative and there are plenty of crappie in Willard, whose population will fluctuate with water levels regardless of what harvest is or how many fish we transfer. The last creel survey we conducted at Willard in 2010 estimated annual crappie harvest in the thousands, while what we are moving will be in the hundreds, so we're only moving a fraction of the annual harvest. Further, as you suggested, we don’t have any work scheduled on Pineview this year, this is the most efficient use of our time.
Yep, last Monday we had decided to pause our netting efforts due to the predicted winds on Monday and Tuesday. Those winds didn’t really pan out on Monday, but we were glad we didn’t have to work nets on Tuesday when the storm hit.
Sorry for the novel. Guess there’s a lot of if's and buts to this work that I figured they needed some explanation.
Chris
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