This is a repeating project by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR) which restocks the fish in 16 counties including lakes in counties Franklin, Wabash and Dubois.
The project yields millions of fish — whether walleye "fry" which are seven to 10 days old or “fingerlings” which are about 1.6 inches long.
Tom Bacula is a fisheries biologist with the Indiana DNR Division of Fish and Wildlife. He said these fish make great “table fare.”
“You see them at a lot of restaurants. Some are commercially harvested from the wild to put on the table, they have a good firm flesh that's not super fishy in taste, especially for our freshwater fish.”
Bacula says walleye and saugeye are also a bit of a challenge to fish. “It does take a lot of skill to catch these fish,” he said. “They're mostly active dawn and dusk, sometimes through the night. And so you got to be out there to entice these fish to bite at some different times than a bass or bluegill, which are a little easier to catch generally throughout the state.”
It’s especially difficult in the summer months when walleye are not concentrated in groups.
He says Indiana, especially southern Indiana, are beyond the walleye’s normal spawning climates meaning there’s almost no natural reproduction without the state program.
The fish prefer “specific water and habitat characteristics” that they need for spawning, like large wind-swept rocky points, or inlet streams.
Also the saugeye is a hybrid of the walleye and sauger created for fishing, so it doesn’t reproduce naturally either. These are actually good things.
“Walleye, since they don't reproduce very well, we can control those numbers in a lake pretty well,” Bacula said. “And so we don't lead to any other additional population issues.”
He said they also keep the populations of smaller species like minnows in check.
The walleye is the fifth most popular fish with anglers — the bluegill is number one.
While the walleye and saugeye stocked this season are very small, he said the DNR are working to increase the size of the walleye they release by keeping them in the hatchery longer, to be better for fishing.
The downside is that this takes significantly more food and costs more money.
Stocked bodies of water, with their county in parentheses, include:
Walleye fry: Bass Lake (Starke), Brookville Lake (Franklin, Union), Mississinewa Lake (Wabash), Monroe Lake (Brown and Monroe), Patoka Lake (Orange, Dubois, and Crawford), and Shafer Lake (White).
Walleye fingerlings: Cagles Mill Lake (Owen and Putnam), Lake of the Woods (Marshall), Pike Lake (Kosciusko), Prairie Creek Reservoir (Delaware), Shafer Lake (White), Summit Lake (Henry), and Tippecanoe River/Oakdale Dam (Carroll).
Saugeye fingerlings: Glenn Flint Lake (Putnam), Huntingburg Lake (Dubois), Koteewi Park Lake (Hamilton), and Sullivan Lake (Sullivan).
The statewide bag limit for walleye, sauger, and saugeye is six fish per day, in combination. For walleye, the minimum size limit is 14 inches for waters south of State Road 26 and 16 inches for waters north of S.R. 26. Exceptions to the walleye size limit are Bass Lake (Starke) and Wolf Lake (Lake), where the minimum is 14 inches; Lake George (Steuben), where the minimum is 15 inches; and Wall Lake (LaGrange), where the minimum is 16 inches with a two-fish daily bag limit.
There is no size limit on sauger or saugeye except on Huntingburg Lake (Dubois), Glenn Flint Lake (Putnam), Sullivan Lake (Sullivan), and on the Ohio River, where the minimum size limit is 14 inches. Typically, walleye and saugeye grow to 14 inches after two years and 16 inches after three years.
Learn more about fishing for walleye and saugeye at wildlife.IN.gov/fishing/walleye-fishing.
Learn more about fish stocking in Indiana at bit.ly/INFishStocking
To view all DNR news releases, please see dnr.IN.gov.
Source: Indiana DNR
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