A spokesperson says a record 882, 000 walleye were stocked in key Wisconsin waters this past year as state, private and tribal hatcheries continued with Wisconsin Walleye Initiative funding.
The Initiative began in the 2013-15 budget and will continue through 2019. It has paid to upgrade state hatcheries and provided extra operating funds needed to grow larger fish on site.
The idea is a larger sized stocked fish is more likely to survive to adulthood. The initiative also provided grants to upgrade three tribal hatcheries and six private facilities to meet the stocking demand statewide.
The DNR's Dave Giehtbrock is fish cultures section chief. He says when the Initiative began more than four years ago the idea was to get more survivability after the hatchery and that appears to be the case....
"....we measure success by looking for those animals in our surveys. Now that we do these stocking events what we're looking for is a population of fish in these lakes and rivers where we did our stocking. We'll be looking at metrics to measure those fish, the number we get back, is there a spawning population, things like that. And for anglers, are we getting a catch for those locations?...."
Natural reproduction accounts for more than 80 percent of the walleye caught in Wisconsin. One of the key hatcheries in the program is the Art Oehmcke State Fish Hatchery near Woodruff.
While stocking the larger, extended growth fingerlings makes sense in some lakes, DNR also stocks about 1.4 million small fingerlings each year, and works with several cooperators to stock walleye fry into several bodies of water. Since the initiative began, more than 2.6 million walleye have been stocked by the state and tribal hatcheries.
