Annual growth of Lake Erie walleye and its effect on recruitment
Benjamen Sylak (technician), and Jason J Van Tassell (PhD candidate).

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Ben Sylak can be emailed at sylak.3@osu.edu

Walleye (Sander vitreus) are the most important recreational fishery in Lake Erie.  Over the last 25 years, this walleye population has varied due to a few, very successful recruitment years.  Many biotic and abiotic factors can influence year-to-year variability in recruitment.  Understanding what drives recruitment variability is important to managers to sustain the walleye fishery. 

Electroshocking on the Sandusky River. Brrrr, it's cold!

Maumee River during the annual spring spawning run

One factor that we know contributes to recruitment success is energy stores (particularly for the female walleye).  We have chosen to use back-calculation (using otoliths) to determine population wide growth for several years.  Our hope is that this annual growth can help us determine how successful they were in acquiring energy stores, and therefore, how likely they were to spawn, or spawn and produce high quality larvae. This data, combined with other factors such as prey densities and overall walleye population will hopefully give us a better understanding of what is driving this highly variable recruitment.