Area fishing guide Joe Carlson watched Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) workers dispose of gill netted fish by dumping them overboard. Some DNR fisheries dispose of fish on the shore, in the lake, or take them back to their office and dispose of them there, said DNR Area Supervisor Steve Persons, adding there was no way to get rid of the fish that would please everyone.
Recently Joe Carlson watched two Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) workers pull walleye and smallmouth bass from gill nets, weigh the fish, measure them, remove the ear bone, split the fish bellies and then sink them to the bottom of the lake.
“They didn’t even put them onshore where they could be eaten by animals or birds. They were just wasted. It really upset me and it doesn’t seem to be necessary,” Carlson said
Joe Carlson loves to fish. It’s his passion. He owns and operates Joe’s Inland Fishing Guide Service and loves to take people fishing, offering more than 30 years of experience. As a guide he teaches his clients the subtle skills of catching walleye, bass, perch, northern and trout.
During his downtime Carlson does what many people in the Northland do. He goes fishing. He was on Two Island in his fishing boat the day he observed the DNR crew gill netting. Carlson respects the fish in the lakes, taking pleasure pursuing them with hook and line.
So Carlson was irritated when he saw the DNR’s process.
“These were catching nice size fish, walleye and smallmouth. They netted three different spots for three different days. One night should be enough. You can go find those spots where they gill netted by finding the dead fish on the bottom of the lake,” he said with disgust.
Steve Persons, area DNR fisheries manager, said gill netting is not used on all of the lakes when they conduct fall and spring sampling. But gill netting is still an important tool to sample some lakes, he said.
“This has been a standard [DNR] tool for this kind of sampling going back to the 1930s,” Persons said. “Throughout the years we can see changes in lakes based on the base line and get information from gill netting that we can’t get from other surveys.”
Persons said gill nets are only used on certain lakes every three to 10 years, and only a small amount of fish are taken—maybe one percent—when the lake is sampled. The number of gill nets set in a lake is determined by the acreage of a lake.
Two Island, at about 800 acres, was last gill netted in September 2012, and 53 walleye and 48 small mouth bass were caught and killed a that time.
“Two Island is already managed by the DNR for smallmouth bass,” Carlson said. “They know the lake has a good fish population already so they don’t have to sample it as often as they do. It’s a special regulations lake. If they want to test the lake more often they can use hook and line.”
But Persons said some fish have to be killed to get the data the DNR needs.
“We can get the age of the fish from the otolith bone buried inside of the fish’s head. The fish are examined internally and externally for parasites and disease. We try to get as much mileage out of each fish as we can.”
Some remote lakes in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness are only gill netted every 10 years or so. Once a lake is sampled the DNR records the results and the next year those survey results are put on the DNR Lake Finder site, and some lakes get hit hard based on fish counts, said Persons.
“We think about that. People are more and more tuned into those online results. But people have a right to know what the results are. A survey done this summer won’t be posted until next summer. With any of our samplings we get an abundance of fish, but that doesn’t let us know if the fish will bite or how often they will bite,” Persons added.
As for Carlson, he doesn’t disagree that the DNR needs to test and sample lakes but he decries the waste of fish. “There should be another way to do this without killing so many fish,” he said.
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