Lake Erie walleye ODNR

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Lake Erie walleye, said Dave Graham, assistant chief of the Ohio Division of Wildlife, are to Ohio fishing as deer and wild turkey are to Ohio hunting.

In other words, Graham told several hundred wildlife division employees assembled for "walleye school" Friday at All Occasions Catering north of Delaware, the fish contributes significantly to their salaries.

About $13.3 million, or 24.5 percent, of the wildlife division’s $54 million revenue in fiscal year 2004 was generated by the sales of fishing licenses, not all of them sold to walleye anglers, of course. Still, about 450,000 people fish in the Ohio waters of Lake Erie every year, the wildlife division reports, and those anglers, the bulk of them walleye fishermen, contribute some $680 million to the state’s economy.

The bulk of those Lake Erie anglers is walleye fishermen, so it comes as no surprise that Lake Erie’s diminishing walleye stock over the long term has been noted with anxiety.

An off-the-charts hatch in 2003 will form the basis of a strong walleye fishery for years to come. It won’t, however, bring back the 1980s, when strong hatch followed strong hatch and created a walleye population that at one point reached about 80 million.

Anglers once spent as many as 8 million hours chasing walleye in a single season. Recently, though, with a fish population spiking at perhaps 40 million after having been much smaller, hours have fallen to around 2 million annually.

The job, then, is to rebuild the Lake Erie fishery to see whether fishermen will come again in gold-rush numbers.

The lake has changed, though, since the 1980s.

White perch invited itself, threatened to take over the neighborhood, then settled in without doing too much apparent damage. Habitat damage caused by quagga and zebra mussels, round gobies, and spiny and sandhook water fleas, all of which hitchhiked into the lake in the ballasts of seagoing ships, seems apparent but has yet to be fully comprehended by researchers.

And those examples are merely a start. Non-native species have been entering the Great Lakes at a rate of almost two species per year.

What eats what and who spoils whose dinner have a significant impact on fish and, therefore, sometimes on fishermen.

An example is the no-keep rule for Lake Erie smallmouth between May 1 and June 25. Research conducted by Ohio State University showed that gobies feasted on smallmouth toddlers if a male smallmouth was removed from its guard duty on the nest for more than 10 minutes. To help preserve the stock, bassfishing rules were altered last year to make the young less vulnerable to a recently arrived predator.

One interesting development that might help walleye fishermen is that Lake Erie is returning to its turbid self. Filtering zebra mussels, once hailed for cleansing the water that resulted in weed-bed growth because light could reach reef depths for the first time in ages, have lost their efficiency.

The result has been increased alga blooms during recent summers. While the lake might not look as pristine, cloudy water could produce better daytime fishing.

That’s because, as wildlife division biologist Jeff Tyson explained, the bigeyed, sight-feeding walleye tend to shy from sunlight and so in clear water feed at night, early in the morning and late in the evening. However, a turbid lake might bring a return of the afternoon bites of 1980s fishing.

Those who prefer to cast for walleye rather than troll for them, then, could well have more opportunity. That should come as hopeful news to those who don’t much enjoy dragging in a planer board and a Dipsy Diver that can occasionally feel heavier than a 3-pound fish.

Roger Knight, the wildlife division’s Lake Erie fisheries program manager, allowed that trying to bring back the 1980s might not be feasible, but a number of initiatives might help.

Among those were a three-fish limit during the spawning season first imposed last year and a 15-inch limit on walleye kept.

Non-native competition aside, trying to restore the walleye population to 1980s standards could be difficult, Knight said. The Great Lakes are entering a low-water point in a recognized 30- to 40-year cycle.

The walleye boom of the ’80s coincided with a high-water period. More water potentially means more fish. Whether 80 million walleye can again be coaxed out of Lake Erie water is questionable, Knight said.