Ohio gets muskie, steelhead stocking assists to cancel out COVID-19 problems

When the coronavrus (COVID-19) came knocking on Ohio’s fish stocking door, it became advantageous to have friends in fisheries high places.

Almost faced with a pulled plug on obtaining walleye eggs for its inland walleye- and saugeye-stocking programs, the Ohio Division of Wildlife just squeaked in under Governor Mike DeWine’s order for state employees to work at home.

And when confronted with a somewhat similar situation for muskie eggs, the Wildlife Division missed the cutoff but found a helping hand next door in Pennsylvania.

Most threatened, however, was the Wildlife Division’s steelhead stocking program. For many years now Ohio has relied on Michigan and Wisconsin to carry the steelhead egg-supplying load.

Yet those two states saw their workers also on curfew, meaning their respective fisheries staffs could not collect steelhead eggs and milt – not even for their own stocking programs.

Thus, the Ohio Division of Wildlife searched – and found – a never-before-used source of raw steelhead stocking material.

As for the walleye eggs, the Wildlife Division managed to obtain its usual supply from 7,850-acre Mosquito Creek Reservoir in Trumbull County, said Scott Hale, the Wildlife Division’s fisheries management administrator.

“We collected our walleye eggs just as the COVID-19 was starting to ramp up, and before the order came down where we wouldn’t safely been able to do the work,” Hale said.

The muskie situation was more worrisome, Hale said, as DeWine’s edict kept the agency’s fisheries staff from working the 1,000-acre Leesville Reservoir in Carroll County to obtain the necessary eggs.

“That was our greatest concern,” Hale said.

But – and it’s an important “but” - says Hale, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission offered to supply the Ohio Division of Wildlife in June with 55,000 muskies, each fish measuring two to three inches long. These fish will come from the former’s Linesville fish hatchery located at northeast end of 17,088-acre Pymatuning Reservoir

And the news here is even better, says Hale also, because the fishes will come with no sales tags attached; for free.

“We’ve helped Pennsylvania before with walleye eggs, and several years ago with muskies when red spot disease hit the fish hard at Pymatuning,” Hale said. “It’s all about being good neighbors.”

Perhaps the greatest potential snag involved obtaining steelhead eggs for stocking into five Lake Erie tributary streams in Northeast Ohio.

With both Michigan’s and Wisconsin’s steelhead egg-collecting programs being furloughed this year, the Ohio Division of Wildlife was itself now facing a skipped steelhead-stocking season in 2021.

“That one was a real doozy,” Hale said.

Hale said the Wildlife Division turned to the White Sulfur Springs National Fish Hatchery in West Virginia. This hatchery is located in Greenbrier County, hard-pressed to Virginia and was established in 1900.

The hatchery ships 10 million rainbow trout eggs annually to 20 state, federal, and tribal fish hatcheries as far northeast as Maine and as far west as New Mexico. It is also a supplier of freshwater mussels for reintroduction programs.

In Ohio’s case, 10 million eggs were not necessary, the Wildlife Division requiring only about 400,000 of them, Hale said.

“The rainbows are what’s called the ‘Shasta strain,’ and I believe their behavior will be similar to our London strain,” Hale says also. “I think this is going to be a one-shot deal, too.”

For Ohio’s old angling hands, the London strain was an early agency’s steelhead program jump-start, the fish typically arrived along the Lake Erie shoreline as early as around Labor Day, providing stream angling action shortly thereafter and at least through early winter.

London strain fish were later supplanted by the so-called Little Mainistee strain of steelhead found in Michigan. The reason for the switch was because the return rate of Little Manistee strain fish is several percentage points greater than is the London strain trout.

The fish from the national hatchery are expected to be stocked in April, 2021 and become available as catchable fish beginning in 2022, Hale says as well.

Asked why the Wildlife Division doesn’t simply capture its own steelhead in the spring and strip the females of eggs and the males of milt, Hale says such operations requires specialized gear with a high degree of limitations and expense the Wildlife Division would just as soon avoid.

“As long as we can keep getting trout eggs from Michigan and Wisconsin we won’t have any problems,” Hale said.

And now add a knock on the door with the federal government, a new Ohio steelhead program partner.

- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischk@Ameritech.net
JFrischk4@gmail.com