The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) reports that in May 2023 an angler fishing off Sheboygan caught a large 16-pound lake trout having a coded wire tag. The tag showed the fish had been stocked in southern Lake Michigan on the Sheboygan Reef in July 1985.
Nearly two generations later, the fish was caught in Lake Michigan not far from where it was stocked.
Lake trout are notoriously slow-growing, but a hatchery-produced fish prowling Lake Michigan for nearly 40 years is a shocker to most anglers. The stocking and coded tagging of lake trout (plus salmon and other trout) is an on-going project of the Great Lakes Mass Marking Program (GLMMP). Stocking replenishes and restores the Great Lakes salmonid fisheries. Coded tags placed in the fish and returned to biologists aids fisheries departments in monitoring and improving fishing throughout the region.
The GLMMP was created by a U.S. Congressional Act of the same name. It establishes a program within the USFWS to work with state and tribal governments to implement mass marking of fish at hatcheries in the Great Lakes area.
The Sheboygan 39-year old laker was raised and tagged at Wisconsin’s Iron River National Fish Hatchery. Returned tags from Great Lakes lakers usually are from fish 20 years of age or less. But 39 tagged lake trout in the Great Lakes have been returned to the USFWS that were 30 years old or more during the last 13 years.
Authorities say lake trout can live up to 70 years in some Canadian lakes. But the oldest laker ever recorded was 62 years of age and came from Alaska. They are ultra slow growing, deep water fish. Some are found in Lake Superior at depths over 300 feet down.
The IGFA all-tackle record lake trout weighed 72 pounds, caught from Great Bear Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories in 1995.
For many years state and federal agencies have stocked millions of lake trout, rainbow trout, brown trout, brook trout, steelhead, Chinook, coho and Atlantic salmon throughout the Great Lakes. Many of those fish have been tagged or fin clipped by biologists to help monitor the return of mature stocked fish to anglers.
Over the last decade hundreds of thousands of tagged stocked fish have been caught by anglers and reported to fisheries personnel throughout the Great Lakes. The relatively new GLMMP is designed to fund use of modern digital code tags in all stocked fish to better manage the Great Lakes’ important salmonid sport fishing.
“Large-scale fish marking allows us to better track migratory patterns and population changes and improve conservation practices,” said U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), one of the Congressional sponsors of GLMMP. “By implementing the Great Lakes Mass Marking Program, we are ensuring that we have the tools to better understand and protect the long-term health of our fisheries.”
The bill is designed to provide USFWS with what is needed to tag every hatchery fish in the Great Lakes. This will allow fishery managers to collect valuable, timely information, ultimately improving the effectiveness and efficiency of hatchery operations and fishery management.
