] turning a great lake upside down
Howard Tanner (2014=91) - started fishing on Sunday mornings with his father at age 5. remembers the catch limit at the time was 15 per day, and the Tanners, like everyone else in those days, were not catch-and-release guys
His first job after graduation was as portentous as it was ambitious. He literally turned life upside down in a little lake in the middle of a Michigan state forest using a generator, a pump and a pipe to suck the water 40 feet up from the bottom to the surface.
"The research reason for that was the nutrients would gradually settle to the bottom of the lake, but there was no oxygen down there for biological activity and the question was: What would happen if you pumped that nutrient-rich water back up on the surface where there was sunlight and life?"
The experiment did what was expected — it sparked a bloom of plankton near the surface. But the flicker of life flared out once the scientists turned off the pump.
1952 - moved to colorado
He found the Western approach to fishery management "totally different, in almost every way" from how biologists approached the job in the Great Lakes region. Perhaps the most important distinction is that so many water bodies out West are vast man-made pools created by concrete and earthen dams. This made them blank canvasses for fishery managers to construct an ecosystem almost from scratch. "When you create new water and there is nothing in it," said Tanner, "you plant something."
1964 moved back to michigan offered job as fisheries chief , lure = there was the vastness of the Great Lakes — the world's largest freshwater system. "I immediately began to think about all the water back there," Tanner said."About 50% of the surface freshwater in the 50 states are within the boundaries of Michigan, and the other 49 states shared the rest of it," Tanner said. "It was a big job."
] inheirting a mess
The Great Lakes had undergone a devastating ecological transformation in the 12 years Tanner had been gone, particularly Lakes Michigan and Huron. Both had been overrun by alewives, a herring native to the Atlantic Ocean. Like salmon, alewives have a freshwater and saltwater phase in their life cycle. Both species are born in freshwater and then descend to the sea before returning to their native waters to spawn. Typically.
decades of commercial overfishing and the lamprey invasion had combined to decimate Huron and Michigan's lake trout population
With the disappearance of this top predator, alewife numbers exploded as they outcompeted the lakes' other smaller fish. Alewives eventually accounted for up to 90% of the fish biomass in Lake Michigan. That means that for every 10 pounds of fish swimming in the lake, nine of those pounds were alewives
Dominant as they were, alewives did not evolve to withstand the Great Lakes' wild temperature swings. That led to frequent die-offs by the billions that plugged city drinking water intakes and smothered beaches under reeking mounds of rotting flesh that had to be cleared with bulldozers and dump trucks.
This allowed researchers to concoct a lamprey-specific poison that was pumped into key rivers and streams. By the time Tanner returned to Michigan in 1964, biologists were dispensing this "lampricide" — essentially an ecosystem-scale chemotherapy — on tributaries across the Great Lakes. The poisoning program, which continues today, ultimately suppressed lamprey numbers to about 10% of their late 1950s' peak.
Despite the initial decline in lamprey, the alewife infestation was raging when Tanner returned to Michigan because the lakes still lacked enough predators to keep their numbers in check. Tanner asked the pilot how big of a mess of alewives he was looking at. The pilot told him it was about seven miles long and two-thirds of a mile across. The surface area of this single slick of dead alewives was nearly the size of Tanner's largest lake in Colorado.
] crowning a new king
Lake trout - natural king, can live up to a century, grow up to 3 feet, not popular with sport fishermen, no fight in the fish due to genetic design,
Salmon - a better option for the Great Lakes would be Pacific salmon, tailor-made to feast on species like the alewife — feed with such ferocity that they can grow to 40 pounds during their three-year life cycle
Tanner's goal wasn't to just alter the species composition of the lakes; he wanted to change the public's relationship with the lakes themselves. Beyond pier fishing for perch and smallmouth bass, fishing in the lakes primarily had been the domain of relatively few commercial fishing crews using big boats and nets to harvest lake trout, perch, whitefish and chubs for restaurants and stores.
But because these commercially fished native species had been so destroyed by overfishing and the lamprey and alewife infestations, Tanner inherited something of a blank slate — almost like a freshly filled reservoir in the West
in 1964 it was long past."
'If I chose to do it, we could do it'
There had been dozens of earlier attempts to plant salmon in the lakes dating back to the 1870s. All had flickered and failed, save for one tiny population in Lake Superior. The previous stocking programs failed because they were not sustained year after year, or included salmon species ill-suited for the waters of the Great Lakes, or because the stocking was done in the wrong place or at the wrong time of salmon's life cycle.But, most importantly, those stocking experiments happened before the lakes were bursting with alewives
prepared to embark on long term stocking program, didnt know how to get it started, northwest hatcher workers having troubles(feeding) hatchery salmon as well. i emergence in the early 1960s of a vitamin-dosed, pasteurized fish pellet made of things like wheat germ and herring guts suddenly changed that. It could be whipped up in industrial-size batches and dispensed daily. It led to a boom in raising salmon out West and that, eventually, led to a phone call Tanner got barely six weeks after he took the Michigan job. An old colleague said Oregon might have some coho eggs to share, a salmon species similar to chinook, though smaller
1964 December — less than four months after he took the job — the first batch of an initial gift from Oregon of 1 million coho eggs was loaded on a plane bound for Michigan.
other ramifictions, surrounding states, provinces of ontario, US feds plan to stock ...
once Tanner got approval from the board overseeing the Michigan conservation department, he and his superiors acted alone — with a focus and purposefulness that reflected their collective war experiences
Coho would be just the first wave of plantings, an enterprise Tanner and his colleagues referred to as "farming" the Great Lakes to create an unmatched recreational fishery
"All my life I have marveled that one person, that happened to be me, was given the opportunity and the authority to make a decision of this magnitude," he said.
a hero or a bum
1966 Tanner left fishersies position for a job as a professer at
ID: 4094
NAME: the-man-with-the-salmon-plan
DESCRIPTION: by Dan Egan @Journal Sentinal A look at the great lakes fishery, how biologists saved it in the 1980's by bringing in Pacific Chinook Salmon to eat the invasive species, only to have it collapse again with the rising, never ending tide of even more ...
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STATUS: Write
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OWNER ID: 75