ELOSTA Meeting June 15th with Guest Speakers from the DEC

[Tall Tails]

Please join us next week June 15th for our monthly meeting at the Mexico VFW at 7pm. We will have Steve Hurst, DEC Bureau Chief of Fisheries and Chris Leggard our DEC Lake Ontario Section Head as our guests. This will be OPEN TO THE PUBLIC as always and will be a question and answer format discussion. They will also have some recent data to share with us.

 

I hope to see you all there and please share this with family and friends!

[Morgan-E]

Hoping to see many old and new faces.  Lots of good, clean, fat, healthy alewives this weekend - looking forward to the preliminary trawl data.

 

[Tall Tails]

Looking forward to seeing everyone tonight!

[Gill-T]

Could someone summarize the takeaway from the meeting in regards to the state of the lake?  Thanks 🙏 

Edited June 17, 2022 by Gill-T

[Morgan-E]

It was a great meeting and we are grateful for Steve and Chris giving us their time.

A brief summary is as follows:

Hatchery is fully staffed and still working on water issues from the wells.

Wild young of the year salmon sampling is the lowest in 10-15 yrs.

Cormorant control is back.

Lampreys being seen on fish are form the 2020 year class that was not treated.

The BIG ONE: --- The new lake management is that it is a wild fishery and will be supplemented by the hatchery system which changes a lot of decisions and puts more chance into the process.

Alewife survey is up to 200 sample sites.

Lake Ontario Advisory Panel will remain as a permanent tool for decision making.

 

Other discussions were about cormorant hazing, stocking techniques, Net Pen projects, Coho study, Atlantic salmon study, ........

There will be a lot more details in the ELOSTA newsletter - 3 pages.

 

Phil

[GAMBLER]

51 minutes ago, Morgan-E said:

 

The BIG ONE: --- The new lake management is that it is a wild fishery and will be supplemented by the hatchery system which changes a lot of decisions and puts more chance into the process.

 

 

Phil

This is a stupid management strategy.  Natural reproduction can not be closely monitored enough to get it right.  Fin clipping shows you a year later what is going on (with angler participation), and seining on the Salmon River only shows one tributaries worth of natural reproduction. The seining also shows you how big of a hatch you had.  It doesn't necessarily mean survival into the lake will be strong on big years.   

[Tall Tails]

I think the management plan is more like Wild fish are going to be considered in the overall biomass when making hatchery decisions.   I don't see it as lowering our inputs from the hatchery   Not yet anyway.