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The acidity of the water is directly related and no one wats to agree because it will take to long and bigger expense ,,Admit it!!
The whitefish section is just as piss poor as the rest of that report.
There is a LOT of things they need to do better, like actually surveying lakes again. If you look through the lake survey maps, you see that most have only been recently done in the late 90's and some not since the 50's. If they aren't actually taking the time to study the waters and are instead relying on anecdotal info and 70 year old surveys, how can they effectively manage a watershed?
Lmao this is one of my biggest pet peevs I always bring up with my buddies. Those surveys are a complete joke. The newest ones are 20 years old. How am I supposed to take any of that report seriously when the lake survey maps are as old as my grandma? And no mention of pike at all in that report. Complete JOKE.
Actually, not that I have intimate knowledge on it all, I fish with a couple bios. Las year they did a bunch of aging studies on whitefish. I supplied a few heads. They ARE looking into how to boost populations. Money and staff are issues. They haven't had a lot of success spawning whitefish and I'm told they are very hard to live trap. I was told that when enquiring why they didn't transplant adults into likely viable waters. Another bio told me to make noise, ie start contacting the commissioner on a regular basis. I DO know a lake that was illegally stocked in the seventies with them and DID have a self perpetuating population until recently. NOW there are clouds of smelt everywhere and the belief is the smelt a simple eating all the spawn and fry.... No small fish, anymore. Maybe one way is a similar program of catching adults and transplanting a couple hundred of them into waters with promising habitat. I dunno, but it has been done.
I know nothing about whitefish so I can’t comment on that.
The survey maps are a joke ! There is many body of waters that now have Rainbows, Splake, Etc. that don’t even list them as species. The stocking reports don’t match up with the same body of water. As far as the Whitefish they are a ghost to me. I have never traveled to Grand lake to catch them. It is a shame they are not in Sebago Lake anymore.
in the late 90's they stripped eggs from a few lakes that had great whitefish populations. grew them out in the hatcheries and stocked them into st. froid up here for several years. none grew to the min. length limit of 16in. and the lake they took the eggs from now has no whitefish anymore. Teampar and i fished it 2 years ago and caught a ton of stunted togue and 1 trout. this same spot 20 yrs ago had huge togue. brookies and whitefish in abundance. i dont have much faith in I.F.W. too many politicians calling the shots and tying their hands. its a damned shame! seeing how government is so out of control it doesnt suprise me.
Whitefish are hard to raise in a hatchery, at least that is what IFW will tell you. Ontario has a very successful hatchery program for whitefish. It can be done. The problem is IFW is centered on brook trout and landlocked salmon. Period. Whitefish are a low interest, winter time fishery that is not going to compete with brook trout and salmon. Its not water quality, that is the issue. Lake trout, smelts and water levels over spawning shoals are where the issue lies.
100% agree. Until the state stops focusing their management goals on stocked brook trout, you won’t see any focus on whitefish etc.
It would be interesting to see the state focus more on self-sustaining fish populations. They seem to be doing this to a degree with brook trout, BUT stocking "put-and-take" brook trout in warm water species waterbodies always seems, to me, foolish at best...
SAM requested, through Senator King, a $5,000,000 earmark to go to IF&W to expand production of salmon hatcheries and to enhance lake whitefish, arctic charr, and other species. It was not funded.Also to say that IF&W doesn't survey lakes and ponds on an annual basis is blatantly false. Just because they haven't updated the lake survey maps doesn't mean they don't do it.
I don't disagree but that is not what you and others said.