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Illegal Stocking a Lose-Lose Situation

August 25, 2009 - BELGRADE -- Seeing isn't always believing.

That's the sage kind of advice the "bucket biologists" among us might want to keep in mind. Sure, you think you know what a fish species needs to survive on its own. You may even be able to see enough in the water below you to know that it looks like prime habitat and spawning grounds for said species.

And you can still be wrong.

Reports this summer of walleyed pike being caught by fishermen in the Belgrade Lakes chain tell us that no amount of angler education is enough. Illegal stocking, sadly enough, is alive and well.

Once the story of Nathan Lawler's walleye catch on Messalonskee Lake surfaced this month, other reports trickled in of people catching walleye in the region, particularly on Long Pond, at least twice this summer.

But judging from the walleye returns over the last decade, illegal stocking of that species isn't going quite as well as those bucket biologists would hope.

A colleague of mine, a non-outdoorsy type by his own admission, asked me why people take to illegal stocking of our waters on their own. The answers are fairly simple.

Local people see waters they'd like to fish as lacking something they want for themselves, so they buy fish out there on the market somewhere and add them to the water they want.

Or, in other cases, they see how rapidly a species like northern pike – with its 20-pound trophies – can grow, and think Maine could use something like that.

The reasons it doesn't always work, particularly in the case of walleye, are far more complex.

According to "Freshwater Fishes of Canada," written by William Scott and E.J. Crossman and considered a go-to guide for vital fish information, there are lots of things about walleye that make them look like they'd work well in central and southern Maine.

We have rocky-bottomed lakes and ponds, virtually all with tributaries of one kind or another running to and fro.

We have moderately deep freshwater locales, something the light-sensitive walleye seeks out.

We have plenty of lakes and ponds where walleye can hide out in the summer in 20 to 30 feet of water.

We have all of those things that would seem to recommend us to a species like walleye.

It's just not that simple, however.

"Sometimes, it's what you can't see that you don't even realize," said local fisheries biologist Scott Davis. "It's under water. And even if you can see (the habitat), you're not even taking into consideration the chemistry of the water."

Which is where it seems walleye run into trouble in Maine. It simply cannot reproduce quickly enough to sustain its presence.

Walleye require a certain level of calcium deposits in the water, calcium that hardens their eggs enough to get them to survive when they are dropped to the lake floor. There, they adhere to the crevasses in the rocks below, where they stay until they are hatched within about two weeks.

No calcium means those eggs are compromised and simply won't adhere the way they need to – making them floating forage for predator species. And even if they do hatch out, which some will, they fight a further uphill battle here. Young of year walleyes (in their first year of life) spend their summers in that 20 to 30 feet of water.

"That's very important, because we have a lot of white perch," Davis said. "I tell you what, I'd hate to be a walleye in central Maine. I'd hate to be a smelt in the state of Maine. Everything wants to eat you."

So go right ahead and keep on wasting your money by trying to introduce walleye into Maine's waters. If you want to be so foolish as to think you can figure out the intricate biology at play in a lake simply because you see a few rocks beneath your boat, that's your prerogative.

It's just that you're wrong.

Even if you can't see it.

TRAVIS BARRETT, Portland Press Herald, August 23, 2009


Lakes: Messalonskee Lake
Regions: Belgrade


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