Where Have All the Walleye Gone?

Written By: Adam Grunwald

Working in Taylor County, Wisconsin there are limited area lakes that have walleyes as a potential catch. Lakes where walleyes can be commonly found in Taylor County are Spirit Lake, Diamond Lake, and Rib Lake where walleye are common. Along with lakes such as Sacketts Lake and Esadore Lake, there have also been walleyes stocked into the Chequamegon National Flowage. The two most common lakes to go catch walleyes are Rib Lake and Spirit Lake and from local anglers and businesses around the area they say that the number of walleyes in Rib Lake have become non-existent. I can personally have been fishing on Rib Lake in recent years and every time I go out the only thing that I catch are bullheads and you just don’t catch a bullhead every once and a while but it’s every cast. Again there is evidence when the local community had their annual ice fishing tournament on the lake on January 8, 2011. Where there was no game fish species on the leaders’ board. I believe that small numbers of walleyes that are being caught in Rib Lake can be due to the large population of bullheads. To try and combat the problem the local lake association set out nets every spring for a couple of weeks to remove bullheads and every year they remove thousands of bullhead. However, since bullheads are a species that have a high fecundity and low predator/prey relationship with other fish species. This allows the remaining sexually mature bullheads to replace the removed stock. Some people would say that you could leave the nets in the lake longer to remove more bullheads. This could work, however it would be extremely time consuming and expensive. Since you would need the man hours to go check the nets and remove any bullheads. My method of removal would seem the most drastic because it would be just to rotenone the entire lake. Rotenone is a chemical that affects the cells of any aquatic species and stops them from using oxygen basically suffocating the species. This would remove all the aquatic species that live in the lake; however the ability for fisheries to recover it wouldn’t be too long before there was a healthy stock of walleyes, northern pike, bluegills, crappies and perch along with aquatic invertebrates. People would be concerned about getting fish stocks back into Rib Lake, they would be even more concerned on how the food sources for these fish species would come back. However, since aquatic invertebrates are extremely adapted to environmental changes, I believe that there will be a higher population of aquatic invertebrates before there is a high population of fish species. Granted there would be years of extremely low fishing ahead but with regular stocking of fish species this could make Rib Lake the premier fishing spot of Taylor County for years to come. If the lake association wants to stick to the net removal tactic it could lead to years and years of poor fishing.