Tribes grow more skilled at gillnetting
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POLSON – Tribal fisheries management is getting more skilled at reducing non-native lake trout from Flathead Lake through gillnetting.
On May 14, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Fisheries Manager Les Everts gave the Flathead Wildlife Board an update on effectiveness of various removal tools for lake trout reduction, including gillnetting which was implemented last year.
“We still have this problem of pretty abundant lake trout. We really haven’t reduced them in a measurable way,” Tribal Fisheries Manager Les Everts said. “We certainly have not reduced them in a way that we are seeing native trout suppressed.”
Tribal government has worked for the past decade to pull massive amounts of lake trout from Flathead Lake, after introduction of the mysis shrimp in the 1980s disrupted the food chain and led to an explosion in lake trout numbers and extreme reduction in bull trout numbers. The native bull trout is designated as a threatened species, with less than 3,000 of the fish estimated to live in the lake.
Since 2002, tribal wildlife managers have hosted Mack Days, a twice-per-year free fishing tournament that rewards people based on the number of lake trout they pull from the lake. Tens of thousands of fish were pulled from the lake during each event, but the popularity of the contest stopped growing, as did general harvest numbers.
“We pretty much plateaued off,” Everts said.
In 2014 the Tribes began to implement a new tool to pull lake trout from the water — gillnetting. From Oct. 1 until Dec. 10, workers pulled approximately 2,400 lake trout. There was a bycatch of seven bull trout, but they were all released back into the lake without being harmed. All of the fish pulled from the lake are documented, and if they aren’t a species of concern, are sent to local food banks for consumption. The 94,000 feet of net also had a bycatch of lake whitefish that was almost as much as the intended catch of lake trout.
“It didn’t really bump it up much, though it bumped it up from the year before,” Everts said of the total number of lake trout pulled from the lake during the year. “The startup training and equipment was a little tougher than what we thought.”
By springtime the team had honed their skills. Gillnetting began March 1 and will run through the end of June, depending on temperatures. So far, fishery management has deployed 200,000 feet of net and has caught more than 10,000 lake trout, with no bull trout bycatch.
Everts said the target for removing lake trout through Mack Days, general harvest, and gillnetting in 2015 is 100,000 fish.
