Musky Report from the St. Lawrence

[John Jarosz]

I received an email from Scott Schlueter today. He's a fish & wildlife biologist who is doing sturgeon & musky work on the St. Lawrence and is involved in a musky egg collection project with ES&F. Here is part of his email that pertains to the muskies up there. he also commented on our telemetry project:

"We ended up wrapping up our musky sampling, as an effort to assist SUNY-ESF with an egg collection.  They did fair better than expected in the upper St. Lawrence R and we caught 2 pairs in the lower St Lawrence R (50.5” and 53.5” female).  The effort resulted in 7 unique parent crosses and I believe 95,000 eggs total.  Water levels (and more importantly flows) created some issues for us.

2017 will be a shot in arm for muskies.  Keep up the great work.

-Scott"

[John Miller]

Great news, hopefully our skies had a great spawn too

[John Jarosz]

John...let's hope they did. The DEC did say that the females electro-fished out of the Harbor were full with eggs however, they were somewhat hard, so not quite ready to spawn. With the water as warm as it is now, hopefully they did their business & moved on. Better yet, if we picked them up on the receivers, we'll have a record of date, time & temp.

The St. Lawrence ones have a huge goby problem & the eggs don't even have a chance of hatching. As soon as they're laid the gobies eat them & that's the end. Right now an effort is underway to collect eggs, take them to a hatchery & immediately release as soon as they hatch. Then let nature take over. Sounds like they had some success doing that 

[John Miller]

Im glad someone's paying attention. DEC to the rescue!

[Stephen Glassic]

Yes. I believe this is the first year that Dr. John Farrell is doing this. He has picked some locations to try it in. The plan is to go back later in the fall to look for young of year to try and determine if the program will work. We are keeping our fingers crossed. Dr Farrell has been very concerned about the future of musky recruitment there because recent YOY surveys have been dismal.