Growth for Lake Pepin vs Rainy Lake Walleyes

See the link below for a graphical representation of the differential growth between Rainy Lake and Lake Pepin walleyes.

Nick Schlesser

Lake Pepin/Rainy Lake Walleye Growth<

That’s an effective display of the growth of P4 vs LOtW’s walleyes!

I really would be curious what other lakes are too like Mille Lacs and Red.

Thanks for the awesome info!!

Very interesting. Thanks for posting

Great information..Thanks

I like the comparison but the age chart seems a bit odd to me.

Age Zero! (0) I didn’t know a fish could grow 8″ by the time is was 0 years old.

We record fish age based on the number of winters it has been alive with all fish sharing the same birthday January 1. Thus a fish that hatched in April of 2012 and was sampled in October or November of 2012 it is an Age-0 but if it is sampled in February of 2013 it would be an Age-1.

Good work Nick and welcome to IDO.

Quote:

---

We record fish age based on the number of winters it has been alive with all fish sharing the same birthday January 1. Thus a fish that hatched in April of 2012 and was sampled in October or November of 2012 it is an Age-0 but if it is sampled in February of 2013 it would be an Age-1.

---

Interesting. Is there a logical reason for using January?
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to use May 1st as the date to start aging fish at?

I’m not trying to knock the work you guys do, just trying to understand why you use January as the beginning and end point for aging when walleyes generally spawn in April.

It is not just for walleye, but for all species. There will be hangups with any date you would choose. For instance fall spawners like brown trout become Age-1 after only a few months, but for most species in MN spawning occurs in spring. By putting the “birthday” on January 1st (in the middle of winter) you never have to worry about an early or late spring crossing your arbitrary date or the varying spawning dates from north to south in MN, and you can easily track how many growing seasons the fish has been through. We often refer to Age-0 fish as Young of the Year or YOY for short and you may see that terminology in DNR reports from time to time.

Nick

Thanks for taking the time to give a detailed answer Nick!

I got some questions at the Walleye Searchers meeting yesterday about this so figured I would just post quickly to bump it to the top so others can find it more easily.

Enjoy.

Nick

Attachments:

1. Pepin-Walleye-Growth1.pdf

Seems I can post the pdfs now thanks for the help BK.

Ignore the top link and hit the one either above or below this post.

Nick

Growth for Lake Pepin vs Rainy Lake Walleyes attached.

Attachments:

1. Pepin-Walleye-Growth.pdf

Thanks for the info. This is why slots have no place on the river IMHO. Nick do you information on other species such as Northern Pike and channels etc. Thanks for taking time to post these things.

Mwal

We have at least some information on most gamefish species. If you are specifically looking for growth by age data we have that for other species as well, but unfortunately Northern Pike are notoriously hard to get accurate ages for so we don’t have that and in general we don’t age the channel cats we capture. So I have numbers and catch rate data for those species, but no recent age related data.

This is very interesting, thanks for sharing!