With the big lake’s open-water fishing season just around the corner, trollers and shore anglers can take a break from readying their fishing gear for another action-packed summer; instead, they should hoist a cool refreshment to celebrate the news that last year’s Coho and Chinook salmon fully cooperated with DNR biologists in Michigan and Wisconsin to provide all the fish eggs needed to fill the newly emptied hatcheries.

Both Michigan and Wisconsin, with their extensive lakefronts, experience substantial salmon spawning runs in several of their rivers, providing the necessary eggs for next year’s stocking—not only for themselves, but for Indiana and Illinois as well. If a spawning run falls short, as occasionally happens, stocking schedules for the following year could suffer.

In the days of yore, when alewives were abundantly plentiful, as many as 16 million salmon and trout were poured into Lake Michigan every spring. But when zebra—and now quagga—mussels showed up, they outcompeted alewives for the lower portion of the forage base, and baitfish population (invasive alewives) crashed.

Without the massive alewife schools to support them, hungry salmon and trout fell on hard times, and their stocking numbers had to be decreased accordingly, falling by more than 50 percent.

The future of this huge sport fishery looked dim indeed. But Mother Nature had a few tricks in her bag, and she came to the rescue. After virtually taking over the lake, the zebra mussels were overwhelmed by the arrival of the larger quagga, and were soon starved into obscurity. While the new arrivals are firmly established, they apparently aren’t gobbling as much forage as the zebras did, and the alewife population has staged a small, but noticeable, comeback.

For the past several years, it has been possible to increase Chinook salmon stocking numbers. Also, the lake trout replaced the missing alewives by switching back to native prey, which not only took some pressure off the alewives, but supplied missing nutrients that were preventing their eggs from surviving for well over fifty years. Suddenly, there were big, fat lakers all over the place, and it won’t be long before they become self-sustaining.

Getting back to the DNR egg-taking, the Manistee River weir, in Michigan, collected enough Chinook eggs to fill their own needs, but also fully supply Illinois and Indiana. The weir at the Platte River garnered 6.5 million Coho eggs, enough for all four Lake Michigan state’s hatcheries.

But wait; there’s more! Michigan also keeps adult fish at hatcheries for egg-taking purposes, and they produced 378,000 brook trout, 448,000 lake trout, 2.5 million brown trout, and 1.5 million rainbow trout eggs. As a bonus, the captive trout also provided 422,000 splake eggs.

So, what not very long ago what looked like a doomed fishery has become a huge resource on the rise. I guess the old adage holds true: You just can’t fool Mother Nature!