I’ll give it a try, I’m not a modeler, but I think the main difference was the model did not differentiate between sexes. I’m not sure why that wouldn’t have been included, but sometimes a model wont work when you add too many variable. Perhaps sex had to be removed.
Anyways that was part of what lead to the population decline, amongst a million other things. Males were being over targeted. Back then we were all about protecting the large female spawners. Turns out it’s more complex than that. Tribal catch is ~80% male by design, but when angler regs were designed to protect the large females, targeted smaller males were hit double. The sex ratio became skewed, before the population declined. This could have been picked up with a split-sex model.
That was during the 24% exploitation rate era, 24% is a fine exploitation rate if a walleye factory is firing on all cylinders, but one thing goes wrong and that becomes a high exploitation rate quickly.
The other invasive that has a profound impact is spiny water flea. Not only do Spiny water flea eat other zoo plankton, but also are not suitable food for forage fish. They get stuck in shiners gullet and they die. I did hear that Tulibee can digest spiny water flea, perhaps if ML is cooking up a Tulibee year class right now Spiny water flea densities would decline?
Last impactful thing I’ve heard of and someone here can probably confirm. During the 70’s and 80’s many cabin and resorts had failing septic systems, and probably pumped grey water right into the lake. These sources of nitrogen fertilized the historically clear and less productive lake. This in turn led to increased productivity lower in the food web that ultimately led to a shitload of food for walleye of all years classes. The clean water act cleaned this up, the lake became less productive, and now despite having miles and miles of premium spawning habitat there isn’t enough food for all these fish. The juveniles regularly starve over winter.
Oh and now the water gets to a million degrees in the summer and frys the juveniles brains. I heard there has been some adult Tulibee die off this past week. Looking forward to cooler weather.