When Minnesota muskie anglers take to the water this weekend, they’ll be chasing bigger and bigger fish — but apparently less and less of them. That’s the emerging suspicion of state biologists monitoring populations on a number of Minnesota’s roughly 100 lakes with strong populations of muskellunge. What they’ve seen is that as the population of muskies ages and fish grow larger — a trend almost certain to continue as the state adopts a 54-inch statewide minimum next year — densities of muskies are falling.
The phenomenon — suspected to be the result of big muskies eating smaller ones — is eye-opening to researchers because numbers of the fast-growing, voracious fish are naturally low to begin with.
For example, 6,581-acre Lake Bemidji is now believed to have a mere 500 to 600 adult muskies in it, according to a two-year population estimate completed last month by the Department of Natural Resources. “You’d think there’d be room for more than that,” said Gary Barnard, the DNR’s Bemidji area fisheries supervisor.
But the good news for trophy seekers: Those fish are huge.
“There are a lot of ’em, a lot of really big muskies,” Barnard said. “A lot of fish over 50 inches.”
In the second half of May, DNR electrofishing crews examined 80 muskies in spawning grounds of Lake Bemidji. As to be expected, most were males, but a number of them were “approaching 50 inches,” Barnard said. That’s a monstrous size for male muskies, the females of which are larger and generally seen as the prizes. Of the females caught, roughly 1 in 4 was longer than 50 inches, Barnard said. The biggest weighed 46 pounds.
“We started seeing this last year on Bemidji, and we were surprised by the size distribution,” he said. “So this year we spanned the entire spawning period to make sure we weren’t doing something that was biased toward capturing bigger fish. We found the same thing this year: A lot of these fish are big.”
In other words, the lake has no problem growing healthy, long-lived, enormous fish, but it might be at the cost of total numbers of fish.
Barnard doesn’t believe there’s anything wrong with what’s happening, but he said he hopes anglers this season — which started Saturday — understand that they may see less “action” from 35-inch to 45-inch fish — because there appear to be less of them in many waters than a decade ago.
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