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5. Coaster Brook Trout
- Wayne State University Press
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5 Coaster Brook Trout Ahmeek, Michigan, and Ashland, Wisconsin Bill Deephouse, a retired fishery biologist, has a friendly, forthright bearing that is true—not at all like the compass that he pins to his chest when he wanders to brook or bush. “It’s not the best of compasses,” he says. “You can almost find any direction you want.” Bill was involved in an undertaking that proved to be equally bewildering —stocking coaster brook trout in the Gratiot River, on the Keweenaw Peninsula, near a little town called Ahmeek, which was Longfellow’s name for the godlike beaver in Song of Hiawatha. The aim of the work: to reestablish a population that would imprint on the river and return to spawn, as many fish are inclined to do, and become a thriving population. Coaster trout are brook trout that leave the river and spend time in Lake Superior, where they get bigger than fish confined to a creek or small stream. Brook trout spawn in the fall and hatch in the late winter or early spring, depending on the water temperature; the warmer the temperature, the faster the process, just like a vegetable garden. An increase of nine degrees—from, say, forty-two to fifty-one degrees—halves the incubation from one hundred to fifty days. When brook trout hatch, they are an inch long, live off a yolk sac, and are called fry. By fall, they are fingerlings, two to three inches long; by the following spring, they are yearlings, five or six inches long. The Fisheries Division of the Michigan DNR has stocked the Gratiot, just upstream from the mouth, with fingerlings and yearlings. Bill was a volunteer on the crew, outfitted with electroshocking equipment, that surveyed the Gratiot each spring, looking for returning coasters. Eight years. Eight stockings. Eight shockings. All in all, nearly 237,000 fish. Nary a one, identified by a clipped fin, found. “I thought it would be awash with fish,” Bill says, “but we’ve never seen or heard of an adult that has come back.” Coaster Brook Trout % 71 Predation might be a factor. The nonnative salmonids alone that have been introduced to Lake Superior are steelhead, brown trout, Coho salmon, pink salmon, king or chinook salmon, and splake, which is a hybrid of lake trout and brook trout. These hungry fish make up what Bill calls “a whore’s mixture” of big predators, which might make young coasters nothing more than a handy meal. Some scientists, Bill says, believe there are three distinct populations of coasters on Lake Superior’s north shore—those from Lake Nipigon, those from the Nipigon River, and those from Lake Superior—and that the Gratiot work perhaps used the wrong strain. “Don’t ask me,” this befuddled scientist says. Native coasters once abounded in the Lake Superior basin. In the 1820s, Henry Schoolcraft wrote about two- to four-pound coasters being caught routinely. The world record is a fourteen-pounder caught in the early 1900s in the Nipigon River north of Thunder Bay, and fish in the eight- to twelvepound range were not uncommon. It would be nice, Bill dreams, if coasters, now “reduced to a memory,” would, with a little help, rebound in sufficient numbers to sustain themselves Bill Deephouse: He has worked on a coaster brook trout stocking program. We’ve never seen or heard of an adult that has come back. [54.163.221.133] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:29 GMT) 72 % chapter 5 naturally. There are no such prospects on the Gratiot, though, and Bill is dumbfounded. He sums up the results as “a deep silence.” He is disappointed. He had dreamed of lunkers. In northern Wisconsin, they’re thinking a lot smaller than that. In addition to planting fingerlings, biologists are planting fertilized eggs. Henry Quinlan of Ashland works on three other coaster projects: on nearby Whittlesey Creek, around the Apostle Islands, and on Isle Royale. Whittlesey Creek is part of a national wildlife refuge popularly called “the little refuge on the Big Lake.” I meet Henry, lean and friendly, one pleasant June evening on the banks of Portage Lake in Houghton, Michigan, his stopover on the way from Ashland to Isle Royale to monitor a coaster population there. He and three colleagues are set to travel the next day to the island on board the Ranger III, a cargo and passenger vessel. The foursome is rigged for electrofishing , including boat and generator. Henry works for the Ashland Fishery...