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Ron Grishaber, Appleton, speared this 212 pound female on Saturday on Lake Winnebago. |
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Records Fall
as 2010 Sturgeon Season Opens
By Dan Rudebeck
Outdoor Sports Writer,
The
Winneconne News
Where the sturgeon season is concerned, every year is different, but I have a hunch that it will be a long time before this year’s sturgeon opener is bested. The largest female sturgeon ever speared in the state of Wisconsin came off Lake Winnebago on Saturday, weighing in at a whopping 212 pounds. Later in the day, a male weighing 116.8 pounds was brought in to the registration at Critter’s Wolf River Sports in Winneconne. This is the largest male ever speared in the state.
In addition to these spectacular trophies, the pace of the harvest on Saturday was tremendous, both on the Upriver Lakes and on Lake Winnebago. By the close of spearing on Saturday, a total of 515 sturgeon had been registered on Lake Winnebago including 256 adult females, or 38.44% of the allowable harvest in that category. The Upriver Lakes registered a total of 141 fish including 38 adult females, or 51.35% of the cap.
Sunday, the harvest rate slowed substantially as spearers began moving around in search of clearer water and/or larger concentrations of fish. At day’s end, 343 additional sturgeon had been taken from Lake Winnebago and 55 fish had been speared on the Upriver Lakes. This year’s season also continued to highlight the increasing size of fish in the population, as more and more 100+ pound fish are speared. By Sunday afternoon, a total of 51 of these monsters had been registered system-wide.
With the decline in the harvest rate on Sunday, fears of a three-day season on the Upriver Lakes eased, and DRN biologist DR. Ron Bruch predicted the URL season could run at least through mid-week and might actually last into the coming weekend. This, of course, depends on the number of fish speared during the following days.
Harvest caps for Lake Winnebago and the Upriver Lakes are set each year in three categories: juvenile females, adult females and males. There are also system-wide caps in each of the three categories. If either fishery reaches 90% of any of the caps before the end of the sixteen day season, spearing will be closed in that fishery at the end of legal spearing hours on the following day. If 100% of any cap is reached in either fishery, the season will close within that fishery at the end of spearing on the day that it is reached. Finally, the same restrictions apply system-wide if any of those caps is reached. It may seem complicated, but it is workable, and the cap system is designed to maintain an annual exploitation rate below 5% for the Winnebago system sturgeon population while maximizing harvest opportunities for spearers. The 2010 sturgeon season opened on February 13 and will close no later than February 28.
Bruch also provided us with a little more information about the huge female that was speared on Lake Winnebago on opening day, saying the fish was likely around 100 years old. This would mean the fish hatched from an egg laid in 1910 at a time when sturgeon stocks in the Great Lakes were at all-time lows due to commercial over-harvest. The fish would have grown to legal size for the Winnebago spear fishery by 1918, but since the season was closed from 1915-1931, it would have faced its first season in 1932. Since then, it’s gone through 78 seasons. It probably spawned for the first time in 1936, and since then, it has probably laid around 11.4 million eggs and produced 228 one-year old sturgeon in its lifetime.
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