Walleye Population

Interesting trivia tidbit in the Dec. issue of In-Fisherman, and I quote:

“The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources esti-

mates that Minnesota lakes contain about 16 million

adult walleyes, weighing about 24 million pounds. Sur-

veys indicate about 2.3 million resicent anglers, If

every angler harvested a single six-fish limit of wall-

eyes, almost 86 percent of the adult walleyes would be

removed.”

The above doesn’t include out of state anglers and on top of that are the poachers as we read about here recently. We can all do our part to substain our fishery by practicing Selective Harvest & Catch and Release and educating the anglers we take fishing in our boats if they haven’t heard of the two.

Leo,

Was there any mention of how many offspring those 16 million fish will produce each year? I ask because current limits are aimed at balancing the factors of the ecosystem, which we are a part of. I also wonder how many of these resicent anglers even pursue a limit of walleye?

what your looking for is “recruitment” information… which basically is the ability of the population to replace itself……

of course it would be quite a blow if 86% of an adult population was removed and I DOUBT recruitment would satisfy the demand… HOWEVER… there are lots of factors involved to make this a MUCH more complicated issue than that simple statement of numbers…. I would guess the purpose of that message was just to encourage catch and release… which is something we are into as well…. so I dont have a problem with “scare” tactics…. although I feel it fosters a certain ignorance….. but speaking as a trained fisheries bioligist (though NOT a practicing one!) I know just enough to say that we are ALL ignorant to some degree or another….. we all operate on assumptions that may or may not be true……

lets just say thats a VERY simple model of reality… so simple that its practically useless in any meaningful terms…..

I borrowed the below info from the Mn DNR website….

“Each year, anglers in Minnesota keep roughly 3.5 million walleyes totaling 4 million pounds. The average walleye caught and kept is about 14 inches long and weighs slightly more than 1 pound.”…

if you want you can do the math for how many per angler that is…. lets just say the average catch rate for walleye is SO low that if it was ME fishing walleyes I would GIVE UP!!

thus we start to intrude on other statistics… like 20% of the Anglers catch 80% of the fish…… that group is certainly the group that visits FTR…. and we KNOW about catch and release and are staunch advocates of it already, if we were not there just might be severe impacts to certain populations of fish……..

*whew*… sorry for the lecture….

While these tidbits of information can be interesting, they shouldn’t be used as a scare tactic or way to get ideals across.

If we put a modest number of non-resident anglers to your numbers, let’s say 400,000 (2.7 million total anglers), they could harvest the entire estimated walleye population.

Does that mean we should reduce the walleye limit to ensure a safe harvest level? If we want to ensure a safe harvest level of 35%, the yearly limit per angler would be 2. That’s yearly! Not daily. Not in possession. Yearly.

Again, while the tidbit of info is interesting, it should serve no use to a fisheries manager. It leads nowhere, unless a person was trying to scare someone into selective harvest and catch and release.

Stillakid: I’ve seen where 25,000 eggs per pound of female walleye is an accepted number. If we assume that half the pounds are females, then 300 billion eggs will be produced.

Well put Topwater!

Even a small percentage of surviving yoy should be a good number if we’re indeed dealing with 300 billion to start with. Thanks for the added info topwater and I couldn’t agree more about this kind of information being used as a scare tactic……….it just shouldn’t be.

In our survey work on the number of fish the average fisherperson harvests it runs something like this – 60% harvest 0 fish, 20% harvest 1 fish, and 6% harvest 2 fish. That accounts for 86% of the anglers harvesting 2 fish or less on a paticular fishing trip.