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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Egg-stripping goes smoothly at Pike River Hatchery

Marshall Helmberger
Posted 4/23/15

PIKE RIVER— Sometimes you get lucky, and that was certainly the case for the DNR fisheries crew working at the Pike River Hatchery this year. This year’s walleye run peaked during one of the …

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Egg-stripping goes smoothly at Pike River Hatchery

Posted

PIKE RIVER— Sometimes you get lucky, and that was certainly the case for the DNR fisheries crew working at the Pike River Hatchery this year. This year’s walleye run peaked during one of the nicest stretches of April weather in quite some time and that made for ideal conditions for the egg-stripping operations.

“We couldn’t have timed it any better,” said Hatchery Manager Jeff Eibler. The crew wrapped up their outside work on Saturday, April 18, just in time to avoid the rain, snow, and extended cold that moved into the area starting on Sunday.

The good weather last week kept the walleye running and it allowed the hatchery crew to complete their egg-stripping in just eight days, with about 810 quarts of walleye eggs to show for it. That’s a bit over the 760-quart quota set for this year.

For now, the eggs are incubating inside the hatchery, where they’ll stay until sometime in mid-May, when the eggs have hatched and the millions of fry are ready for release.

While the fry will be used to stock dozens of lakes across the region, about 10 million fry will be returned to Lake Vermilion again this year, according to Eibler. And that’s actually a much better return to the lake than would occur naturally, he said. “In nature, only 1-2 percent of the [roughly 80 million] eggs collected this year would hatch, but in the hatchery 75-80 percent hatch.” That means more fry for Lake Vermilion than otherwise be the case, with tens of millions of fry left over for stocking other area lakes, according to Eibler.

This year marks the final year that the Vermilion fry will be marked with oxytetracycline, a chemical that allows DNR fisheries staff to easily identify stocked fish from those that are naturally-hatched. It’s part of a multi-year study to determine the overall effectiveness of stocking as a means of boosting fish populations in area lakes.