A Fall Look Into the Fishing Future
Ron Wilson
In the effort to help manage many of the fisheries around the state, North Dakota Game and Fish Department fisheries biologists sampled young-of-the-year fish earlier in fall with a variety of nets to evaluate the survival of stocked and naturally reproduced fish.
Scott Gangl, Department fisheries management section leader, said what is learned in fall when most anglers have traded fishing rods for shotguns, is just one more piece to add to the management puzzle.
“In fall when we net these young-of-the-year fish, we know if we had good reproduction or poor reproduction. We know whether our stockings were good or whether they didn’t work so well, giving us an idea of what’s in the fishery now,” Gangl said. “We still have to get them through their first winter, which is a huge bottleneck and a huge hurdle to jump over for a lot of fish. But once they recruit to the adult population, once they get through that first winter, then we’ll have more comfort in knowing that they’re going to survive and grow and be there for anglers in the future.”
Considering the Game and Fish Department manages about 450 fisheries, it’s unrealistic to think they can sample every water in fall for young-of-the-year walleye, yellow perch, bluegill, forage fish, the list goes on. Fisheries biologists prioritize lakes that are important to anglers, meaning that Devils Lake, lakes Oahe and Sakakawea, and the Missouri River System are sampled every fall.
“And then we’ve got our smaller district lakes. Some of them are very important, some of them get a lot more use than others. So, we try to prioritize those as well,” Gangl said. “And then as we get down to the lower end of the priority list to lakes that don’t see much use, then we kind of pick and choose. If, say, one of the lakes lower down the list was stocked for the first time, biologists may want to see how that effort went. It all depends on what biologists want to learn out of that lake.”
Gangl said results of this fall’s survey efforts on district lakes were, overall, average to above average.
“It really varies from lake to lake on an annual basis what we see out there. There are going to be some years where it’s going to be all good or all bad, but most years are going to be somewhere around that average if you’re talking about the whole state,” Gangl said. “There’s going to be certain areas around the state where we may have seen better perch reproduction. I think that was one thing that I noted while going over some of the field staff notes. We saw a lot of natural reproduction of perch in some places, almost too good in some places where we already have abundant perch and we don’t need more.
Young-of-the-year walleye from Lake Sakakawea's Douglas Bay
“That’s the kind of thing to note, because we don’t always need natural reproduction every year. We don’t need good year-classes every year. It’s nice to have some spacing in there to let a good year-class survive and grow up,” he added. “If you have too many back-to-back year-classes, it results in too many smaller fish out there. And so, we’re going to see some of that in our smaller bluegill and perch lakes.”
News from North Dakota’s higher priority lakes painted a brighter picture. At Devils Lake, for instance, biologists saw a record number of young-of-the-year walleyes, which is significant considering both snowpack and runoff into the lake were down. The last time biologists encountered a catch like this year’s was 2009, when Mother Nature provided a really good snowpack, followed by a lot of runoff.
“In 2009, with the good snowpack and runoff, we kind of felt like that may have contributed to a good year-class that year. Well, now this year we had the opposite, and we had a record year-class. So, we’re kind of learning as we go about what produces these record year-classes,” Gangl said. “Other lakes connected in the system also saw pretty good production, like Stump Lake downstream. Also, on Devils Lake we saw a pretty good year-class of yellow perch, which is significant because it’s been a few years since we’ve had good perch reproduction.”
Taking a lake-wide look at Lake Sakakawea, Gangl said biologists reported the eighth highest catch of young-of-the-year walleye on record.
“We saw really good natural reproduction and the sites that we stocked on the lower end had really good survival. We also saw pretty good reproduction of some of our forage fish … the goldeye had a pretty noteworthy catch rate this year.” Gangl said. “The one thing that is missing and that anglers have been starting to notice is a downturn in our northern pike populations because they require a lot of flooded vegetation for spawning and they haven’t had that in a few years.”
Lake Oahe has produced a number of good back-to-back walleye year-classes and 2025 wasn’t any different.
“It’s almost getting to be too much, but at least the forage base is starting to come back. In Oahe in South Dakota, they’re starting to see more smelt and lake whitefish have been producing some forage,” Gangl said. “We also saw some gizzard shad reproduction on the river and in Lake Oahe this year, which is something our biologists noted as being better than it has been for a number of years. Gizzard shad are sensitive to cold water and hard winters, and their populations declined when we had some harder winters, but they’re slowly rebuilding their numbers throughout the reservoir and river.”