It was cold and it was raining, but volunteers with the Lake Nipissing Stakeholders Association were out Friday working on their walleye restocking program.
The LNSA represents the local businesses that service the Lake Nipissing and area tourist trade.
On this day the Association was working in co-operation with the MNRF who set their nets at Wasi Falls in Callander Bay. Every morning they go out to check the nets and tag and measure fish to do a spawn assessment.
They then bring over the males and females and put them in pens for the LNSA.
"It's at this point we harvest the eggs from the females," says Scott Nelson, the vice president of LNSA. "We then take the milk from the males and we mix it and put it through the tannic acid mix."
The acid strips adhesive off the eggs so they don't clump together.
"In the hatchery, they have to have lots of oxygen," explains Nelson. "If they clump together they die."
Stickiness is needed in the fall so the eggs can stick to a rock and that's where they hatch, but in the hatchery where they are all together, you need them to spool around to get oxygen.
It's a bit like a recipe.
"They go into the tannic acid mix for two minutes, then we rinse them in fresh water for five minutes, then we put them in hardening drums where the egg will expand about three times its size in about an hour and harden to allow us to take them to the hatchery."
On Thursday the MNRF processed over a thousand fish with most of them young males.
"We did see some 40 cm females though, which is really good for Lake Nipissing and that's why the regulations are the way they are to allow those young fish to make it to the spawn, so there is some optimism there for sure," said Nelson.
There have been claims in the past that restocking doesn't work in a lake like Nipissing, but Nelson discounts that theory.
"You've never heard restocking doesn't work from the LNSA, that's for sure. In our mind restocking works only because of the life stage. The greatest loss is from when the eggs are laid till they hatch. Only about five per cent of eggs that are laid in the wild actually hatch. In the hatchery you'll get anywhere from 60 to 90 per cent of the eggs will hatch."
The LNSA has a license to take two million eggs so it expects to produce more two-year-old fish just based on the number of fry that get released into the lake.
The egg gathering process can take from three to 14 days.
"If the temperature goes cold the females will go green meaning they won't release their eggs, so we release those females to go to the natural spawn."
Despite all the negativity surrounding the issue, Nelson is optimistic about the future of Nipissing Walleye.
"We're seeing more small fish which has been predicted by the MNR, and their data has shown there are more small fish. However, six-year-old females are the key to the success of Lake Nipissing and we are starting to see some of those young females coming in.
"The last couple of years the walleye population is going up. [NFN] Chief McLeod has made some changes to their fishery, which is very promising and I believe is part of what we're seeing in the success of the increase of the walleye population in Nipissing, so yes I think it's working."
