Vanishing yellow perch a riddle without solution
If a slam-dunk cause could be determined, a slam-dunk fix might be possible. As things stand, fishermen will bear the brunt of restoration efforts when a 10-fish limit goes into effect May 1 in the waters between Huron and Fairport Harbor, a highly populated, 82-mile stretch of shoreline.
Commercial netters, for whom yellow perch represent a sizeable portion of revenue, also face significant cuts.
Older sport anglers lived through years when the ceiling on catching perch was unlimited, although in recent years even the reduced 30-perch daily limit began to seem like ironic overkill.
Capt. Bob, a committed Lake Erie angler who frequently fishes the area of decline, responded to an alert about the impending 10-fish limit with a written shrug.
“That’s eight more than I caught last year,” he wrote in an email. “Got two trolling.”
The Ohio Division of Wildlife has come up short of answers about where the perch went save for this one: “We know the perch are doing well in the western basin,” said Travis Hartman, administrator of the wildlife division’s Lake Erie fish management program.
Consequently, daily limits will remain 30 west of Huron and east of Fairport Harbor, where yellow perch are holding their own more than thriving.
Catch limits are designed to ensure fishing doesn’t deplete fish stocks to a level below sustainability. Those efforts, however, leave out the unexplained influences that led to what looks like a crash in part of the lake.
Profuse algae blooms during the summer cause widespread areas of lowoxygen water in the central sections of Lake Erie, a factor in fish movements and possibly affecting the survival of young fish. Invasive species, including water fleas, mussels and white perch, have changed the dynamics of the lake.
Despite the unknowns, a rebound in yellow perch numbers isn’t out of the question, Hartman said, as long as a sustainable population is maintained. The fact that perch hatches have been good in the western basin while not good in points east follows a pattern.
“We rarely have good hatches in both basins,” he said.
Yellow perch sustainability can be uncertain because the species isn’t particularly long-lived. A strong hatch of walleye, for example, can sustain numbers for 10 years or longer. Perch hatches peak in only three to four years in terms of catch, and virtually all perch are gone from natural mortality after about eight years, Hartman said.
Strong hatches for yellow perch, in short, have to occur at more frequent intervals than do walleye to maintain numbers. More than 10 years have passed since the last exceptional hatch occurred in the Huron-to-fairport Harbor section.
The tracking of hatches doesn’t describe the dynamics of hatch failure and success, but it does illustrate how numbers can affect limits.
The limits pertaining to the three management sections of the Ohio waters of Lake Erie are lifted from a table first included in the Ohio Administrative Code in 2009 and renewed several times since. The limits are linked to the number of walleye and poundage of yellow perch that are allocated annually to Ohio as part of an agreement with New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan and the province of Ontario.
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