Bold Gold and Garney Green

It was a place called Kiss Lake, connected by a shallow channel to Joy Lake. Northern Wisconsin, and forty-some years ago. It was our first time on the lake. We were in a canoe and in exploratory mode, just working our way around the lake. The water was incredible. It was clear, to the point that you could see fine detail on the bottom in 12 feet of water. In fact, we could see perch…big perch, despite their bars of yellow and green that camo them so effectively. I dive fresh water frequently, and this camo feature means that at times I can be right in a school of dozens of fish and not know it until they flush.

But that first day on Kiss Lake was memorable…we had live bait, probably worms, and by working the bait near the perch, with just a small hook and split shot, we caught a couple dozen fish from ten to thirteen inches. Walleye are in the perch family, and both perch and walleye are excellent eating. Perhaps the quality of the water comes through subliminally, but those fish, as well as the largemouth bass we took from that lake, were delicious. Some of the bass broke the six pound barrier, which is a very good bass in northern Wisconsin.

I remember one of us hooking a still larger bass…I estimated eight or more pounds, which is extremely large for northern Wisconsin. In the clear water we watched the battle. We could see the fish’s white gaping mouth through what seemed like thirty feet of water. The single hooked rubber worm tore out. The fish escaped. But its image lives on.

Last year in a different place I caught over 900 perch on one body of water over a summer. These are also wild fish, and they still are excellent eating. Catching so many is not a function of skill or even luck, at least not in Fish Fry Lake at Shepherd, the setting in which I fished for these perch. This story will explain why.

Perch happen about ten degrees to either side of the 45th parallel. Now bear with me here: I’m about to describe a somewhat cerebral approach to year-round perch fishing. You don’t have to go to such extremes to catch perch, but with this detail you gain a basis or infrastructure of understanding, and that’s always better than the alternative. So in the winter I’d start measuring at around eight feet or more of depth, and usually there’s ice to contend with. I’d measure temperature, looking for water that is around 39 or 40 degrees. In some unusual settings, you might even find warmer water, perhaps associated with a spring seep. This could be good. When you find your warm water, which in winter is likely to be at or near the bottom, then measure its dissolved oxygen content. If you don’t have a working, as in correctly calibrated DO meter, than read on anyway, so you can see the connection.

Dissolved oxygen is what fish breathe. Without it, they don’t happen. Different fish have different DO requirements. For Yellowstone Cutthroat trout, for example, of which the eastern most population is also present on Fish Fry Lake, we keep DO levels at or above 6.5 milligrams per liter, which translates to parts per million.

Perch have evolved around the bottom of lakes and ponds, where nutrients tend to accumulate. As the primary bacteria that digest nutrients do their thing, they consume dissolved oxygen. For this reason, perch have adapted to low dissolved oxygen conditions. They can get by at around 2 parts per million. However, they like higher levels much better, and they feed more aggressively when there is more air. So this means that you should look for both, 40 degree water and dissolved oxygen levels in the range of 5 or better. This is a splendid combination for perch.

So let’s say you’ve found this combination. Very good, but you aren’t done yet. Can you combine these elements with one more…like a weed bed, as in a perennial weed bed where the plant material has not completely died back with

the onset of winter? Or maybe a submerged brush pile, or a tree? Consider that perch don’t get very large. The world record was just a bit over four pounds, and caught in a brackish water setting in New Jersey. Most state records are in the two pound range. This means that perch are in danger of consumption by other types of fish, and they know it. So they are always interested in an escape option, which means cover. Weed beds, branches, rocks, all of the above.

So let’s say that all of these features have come together. Let’s say that the barometer is falling too. The day is not unreasonably tough…say it’s ten degrees out, minimal wind, and due to warm up later in the day. So you set up with a small weighted hook, maybe with a spinner blade, and hook up a maggot, or a minnow, maybe a fathead, and present it about six to twelve inches off the bottom. Maybe you’ve used a sonar or underwater video to take a look at your site, and maybe you’ve even seen fish. All of this is good. Nice setup for January, and pretty much the same for the rest of winter, until open water. However, in winter, when water temperatures are below 50 degrees farenheit, perch are not normally growing. They simply subsist. This means that when the bite is on, it is not likely to be an aggressive bite. Fish take a bait, but it’s easy to miss hooking them. They are slow and almost feeble in their feeding. They can turn off at the flick of a switch. My experience is that they tend to bite best between midday and right before dark.

If you can chum for perch, and blend the chumming with a sound cue, like rapping with a rock on an ice auger extended into the water, and do so repeatedly once or twice a day for a week or two prior to your “event” day, then, in combination with all of the other optimal features you are likely to catch a bunch of fish. I don’t do tournaments, but it would not surprise me to find tournament competitors using some or all of these strategies where legitimate.

Here in Montana, towards mid to late March, or even sooner what with climate change, ice opens up, and with every

degree of added warmth perch tend to bump up their activity level.

Last Sunday for instance, March 18th, five of us fished open water on Fish Fry Lake here at the Shepherd Research Center. We fished from a floating island, and never moved. We landed 141 fish in two hours. Later that day two other fisherpeople, fishing the same location, caught 21 more perch. Incidentally, two of the perch caught that day weighed slightly over 30 ounces. We did not do scale aging on the big fish, which based on previous aging were probably five years old, since they were released along with the nineteen other three and four year olds caught that day. The fish were biting/active throughout almost the entire period during which we fished. Water temperature was 42 to 43 degrees, top to bottom in 21 feet of water, because of an air diffuser system mounted on the island that moves up to 10,400 gallons of water per minute as direct flow and accordingly homogenizes temperatures and dissolved oxygen levels around the island. In fact, DO levels were at 14 parts per million, or saturated based on the water temperature. Cold water can hold more oxygen than warm water, so “saturated” might be 10 parts per million when the water’s in the 70’s.

Catching Perch in the Spring

Perch start to spawn at around 47 degrees Fahrenheit. The females, which tend to be larger than males, will spew a string of eggs over branches or brush, or weeds, and probably rock if the other structure isn’t available. Then the males follow up. Although north Americans tend to have misgivings about harvesting spawning fish, thinking that we are likely to mess up a waterway’s productivity, the following example may help in your understanding of productivity logistics.

Last year between June 27 and October 17th on Fish Fry Lake we harvested 1,928 fish, and 95% of these fish were perch.

We had tagged 280 perch earlier in June. By tracking the ratio of tagged fish caught over the course of the season and into the following year, we now know that there are still 5,400 perch of catchable size in the pond, as of March of this year.

A single large perch, like those 30 ouncers, can lay about 210,000 (this is from memory) eggs. Accordingly, unless some disaster befalls this waterway, there will be many millions of perch fry happening in this pond as of early May, when they hatch here at Shepherd. By optimizing periphyton growth in this pond, and because the perch fry are being eaten by larger perch, and crappie, and Cutthroat Trout, We anticipate that the young of year perch will grow up to 7.5 inches by mid October, typically the end of our growing season. However, unless we contribute to the predation of these small, young of year fish starting in the second half of August and aggressively during September and October by harvesting about 5,000 of them, growth rates may diminish. The catch ratio will help us track where the new age class is in terms of numbers. Imagine the challenge of convincing regular fisherpeople that they need to keep those young of the year perch, those seven inchers. If we don’t harvest them aggressively, than their rate of growth will slow down dramatically, and eventually even a five year old perch will only be ten inches long. Today, the five year olds here at Shepherd can be fourteen inches long, and weigh nearly two pounds. And even young kids catch them. And incidentally, the idea of perch growing from O to 7.5 inches in one growing season is reflective of the impact of abundant periphyton. Average growth rate of wild perch is much closer to four inches in the same time period.

Different size perch eat different food.

Perch fry, as in baby perch, not the cast iron and peanut oil perch fry, eat periphyton. This is the stuff of life. It’s the

slime that collects on almost any surface area underwater. It contains biofilm, generated by and consisting of friendly bacteria doing what they are supposed to do, and whatever sticks to biofilm, which is pretty much all the particulates, especially very small ones, that occur in water. So remember Kiss Lake?

There weren’t excessive nutrients getting into Kiss Lake, since it was not developed with vacation homes at the time. There were no farm fields nearby. There were no cities, or even villages, upstream draining into the lake. The lake had plenty of perennial or inorganic substrate (surface area), which is a key factor of potential limitation for biofilm. So the bacteria that were there could keep up with the natural cycle of nitrogen and phosphorus nutrient inflow, and since they are faster at taking up nutrients than algae is, they were winning the battle. There would have been some free floating algae, but not much. Not enough to see with the naked eye. It isn’t competitive with a healthy culture of biofilm generating bacteria.

And then there are diatoms. Both Kiss Lake and Fish Fry Lake are abundant with diatoms, and diatoms are number two on the food chain, right after biofilm. They tend to stick to and grow on biofilm. And technically, they are a crossover life form, in that they actually are an embodiment of single celled phytoplankton or algae, but they can get by in low light settings, unlike most other plants. So if you think about the ocean, for example, and its depth, you can appreciate that diatoms, which can occur in free floating and surface area bound forms, represent the single largest life form available. When they combine with biofilm, you have diatom based periphyton. In between and mixed in these two bases of the food chain are the countless variations of life that live in the forest that is periphyton. This is where incredible bio-complexity happens, everything from protozoa to zooplankton to scuds. And countless more life forms. They are the “meat” of the meat and potatoes that is periphyton. They are mostly invertebrates. In other words, no skeletons.

And they are what minnows and the fry of almost all fish subsist on. When you have lots of healthy periphyton, your early stage fish growth, and probably productivity, can be off the charts!

Imagine a floor of soft, spongy and edible gunk. With all kinds of other material, some of which is also eatable, loosely stuck to it, and then diatoms, like the trees of a forest, except far more diverse in shape and design. Perhaps the most creative examples of life’s structural variations fall within the diatom repertoire, from crystalline to amorphous, and everything imaginable in between. And this is home to an eruption of the other more complex life forms, including invertebrates. These critters without internal skeletons, the zooplankton and their brethren, exemplify the healthy food web. Biofilm is the sauce, diatoms the veggie, and invertebrates the main course. And as you get closer to full light there will be more forms of plants, like green algae, in the periphyton mix. Keep in mind, biofilm-generating microbes don’t need sunlight, but all of the plants, from diatoms on up certainly do. So, without clear water, fish productivity is ultimately impinged. And periphyton is how you get to clear water.

The more direct the transition from periphyton to fish within a waterway, the higher the waterway’s fish productivity. This broad brush statement holds true time after time.

What it means is that, whether it’s perch or tilapia, fathead minnows or crawfish, if there’s only a couple steps, or life forms between periphyton and fish, the waterway can experience very high fish productivity. But for such a waterway to keep this super highway of life moving, other factors come into play.

Most fisherpeople would describe Kiss Lake as a great fishing

hole. It was secluded, quiet, and fished only occasionally. And we may have altered the balance, because after discovering the lake I went back a number of times and harvested largemouth bass. We caught stringers of bass that were heavy, and there was only the natural inflow, the natural cycle of nutrients coming in and cycling within this lake. We could not know what the stewardship requirements of this lake were, not with the limited information we had then. But we stayed within the bag limits and harvested and ate the fish, and this was the state of the art of stewardship, back then, forty years ago. And I don’t know how the lake responded to our harvest. Did we remove enough largemouth that the perch young-of-year survival expanded beyond the tipping point? Maybe the remaining bass couldn’t keep up with the burgeoning perch numbers and when snow cover limited diatom based dissolved oxygen production, late winter or even late summer, early fall, a dissolved oxygen deficit happened, which took out the largemouth. Maybe. And maybe the downward cascade was exacerbated by their carcasses, which also consume oxygen as bacteria digest this concentrated nutrient source. Or maybe the bass that were left grew at a terrific new rate since the perch prey base had expanded and they had less competition from other bass?

Kiss Lake may have absorbed our impact and been just fine. I know the landowners there complicated access to the lake. Prior to true, objective, science based stewardship, the concept of conservation was the best alternative. Maybe the lake is just as wonderful today as it was then, or maybe not. But it certainly served me as a model of quality, and I am grateful to it, and for it.

But the reality is that Kiss Lake exemplifies our ideal lake. Fish Fry Lake, on the other hand, is probably five to eleven times more productive than even a classic lake like Kiss Lake was forty years ago. There are two primary reasons for this. Fish Fry receives steady nutrient inflow from agriculture. And Fish Fry is stewarded so that those nutrients transition

to periphyton, and from there to harvestable fish, quickly.

Today, for example, half the lakes in the U.S. are where Fish Fry Lake was when we initiated stewardship. They are essentially dead, or poised to die. They are eutrophic, or even hyper-eutrophic. And the same condition exists in much larger bodies of water, like Chesapeake Bay, or about 10,000 square kilometers of the Gulf of Mexico, or over 390 other very large dead zones within oceans around the world. And there are tens of thousands of freshwater lakes that are going through the same trauma, but differently, because salt water and fresh water behave differently.

Today we have the science. We know how to steward nutrients through our waterways, and transition them into fish. What we don’t necessarily have is the broad understanding that we have this capacity. That’s why I’m writing this story. This is what we do at the Shepherd Research Center. We are trying to understand how we should steward our way towards sustainability. And the stewardship of and harvest of fish, like perch, is probably the ideal way to fix water.

SUMMERTIME, AND THE PERCH ARE BITING…..

When Fish Fry Lake’s water temperatures move into the 60’s and warmer, perch are very active. The literature says they stop growing when water temperature falls below 50 degrees, and again when it gets above 78 degrees. Here at Shepherd we usually break into the 50’s around May 1, and drop below around mid October. So perch have about 165 grow days, give or take a couple, here on Fish Fry.

Young of the year perch are particularly motivated to grow quickly. Until they get to five or six inches in length, they are food for the big perch and crappie and Cutthroat trout. During this portion of their life, their primary food is periphyton. It’s their meat and potatoes. Along the way

they may eat other foodstuffs, but periphyton surrounds them. It’s both easy and abundant, since it grows on almost every surface area within the pond, and we have stewarded for extra.

We enhance for periphyton by circulation. Fish Fry has phosphate rich groundwater perking into it constantly. We use an airlift diffuser system to move this water horizontally through weed beds, over rock piles, through standing dead trees and brush piles, and around and through floating islands. The islands are made of filter material. Every cubic foot of these unique floating islands provides nearly 400 square feet of surface area. And all of this surface area is the key to periphyton.

Plants can grow through the islands, and their root systems, and the root hairs upon those roots, adds even more surface area. So small perch, wherever they are within Fish Fry Lake, are surrounded by food. They live in a supermarket. And it’s summertime, and their job is to grow up fast.

Female perch in Fish Fry, so far, go from zero to 7.5 inches in 165 days. The males tend to be about an inch and a half shorter during the same period. Combined, their growth rates are35% faster than the fastest growth rates recorded in a 14 state study tracking wild perch, and other freshwater fish species, growth rates. Here are the primary reasons these perch grow so fast:

1. They have high quality food.2. The water quality is high, and dissolved oxygen

levels are optimal.3. Sunlight can reach to the bottom across over 90%

of the pond, which results in healthy and abundant periphyton on the vast supply of substrate/surface area. This substrate also provides security cover options for small perch.

4. Circulation prevents nutrients from accumulating in the otherwise stratified deep zones. Instead, those nutrients are now quickly presented to

biofilm generating bacteria present on the substrate, forming the basis for periphyton.

There are a few other features that come with this package. As we harvest fish, we harvest the nutrients within these fish. These nutrients are what cause eutrophication. They are what cause marine dead zones. They are what cause harmful algae blooms. They are why water can run out of dissolved oxygen, resulting in fish kills and hyper eutrophication. They are the root cause of other problems, like swimmer’s itch. They are one of the leading causes of turbid water. They are why dead water stinks. They are the root cause of massive underwater plant growth. And more.

By growing fish at a furious rate, we can have Kiss Lake, times five or ten, or even fifteen. The fishing can be five or ten times as productive as the best wild fish fishing hole you have ever experienced. The sustainable harvest, as in taking fish home to eat, can be in excess of 250 pounds per acre. Your 50 acre lake can provide over six tons of healthy, beautiful, bold gold and garney green fish.

What is garney green? The answer derives from what we’ve learned via aquaculture. When perch are farmed, enclosed in some contained setting and fed a commercial feed, they lose their natural gold and green sheen, and take on a grey and yellow hue. Their coloration is both, subdued and changed compared to their wild counterparts. Healthy wild perch will be glistening with umber gold highlights, and their green bars are the green of life…garney green, as my Irish fishing mentor would say.

Have you ever noted the difference in flavor between the shaved baby carrots offered in grocery stores, against true baby organic carrots, grown in real dirt with manure, and critters that live in the dirt, like actual worms? Go to a large conventional truck farm growing produce in the Imperial Valley of California, and look for an actual earth worm. Good luck.

And then visit the New River, which flows through the valley. Check for fish, maybe try and catch one. Let me know how you do, in this river that originates in the toilet bowls of Mexicali before flowing north into Calexico and from there through some of the most intensive farm ground on the planet in the Imperial Valley, and eventually into the Salton Sea, a very large, 70 mile long, thirty mile wide example of hyper eutrophication.

But it’s summertime on Fish Fry lake, and young perch are eating up a storm, doing exactly what they are genetically programmed to do by eons of natural evolutionary programming. And their parents are eating them left and right. Sometimes the female young of year actually eat their little brothers too. There is no mercy shown. This is hard core nature, and nature is a hard ass. Nature is not Bambi. Bambi is, or has become, a vision of how some misguided humans see nature. But baby perch face life and death continuously. For them it’s eat or die. Grow or be eaten. Eat or be eaten.

Year-two fish are still eating some periphyton, at least until they are about eight inches in length, but now they can also eat bigger things, and snails are high on their list. So are Backswimmers and small nymphs, perch fry, crappie fry, trout fry, and stickleback and fathead minnows. These two year olds also eat slivers of cut bait, they eat fish eyes, they eat worms, they hit jigs with polymer twister tails or minnow replicates. They can be caught on nymph patterns or wet flies, or spinners, or small rapalas and similar fishing plugs. These are the size perch that most fishermen are familiar with and catch the most. They are not viewed as great fish. They are too small…it’s a hassle and hardly worth the effort to clean them what for the small fillet that results. And here’s the worst part…in a non stewarded waterway this is the largest size that 99 percent of perch will achieve.

In many lakes even a five year old perch doesn’t exceed ten

inches, and might weigh five or six ounces. In Fish Fry Lake five year old perch will be fourteen plus inches long and weigh 30 ounces.

Today’s standard approach to lake management will be to include large predator fish in the predation hierarchy. These big fish, like large mouth bass or northern pike or musky or walleye, eat eight or nine or ten inch perch, even bigger ones in the case of pike and muskie. The result can be reasonable. Rarely do perch get totally wiped out…and the ones that are left tend to gain size, and can become nice, harvestable fish. But what does suffer in such a management scheme is the waterway’s productivity.

Remember the point about productivity associated with proximity to the base of the waterway’s food chain? The fewer transitions between life forms, the greater the productivity in terms of harvestable fish. Every time nutrients transition through another life form efficiency of the waterway’s productivity reduces. On the other hand, it’s a blast to hook and catch fifty pound muskies. But, if the goal is to steward your way through nutrients, then you may want to consider a variation in stewardship towards species that stay closer to the food chain base. And you will then need to design for efficiency of both, harvest and processing of fish. The fish have to be plentiful, the fishing access has to be reasonable, and the processing of the fish needs to be easy.

So let’s say that it’s summertime and you want to catch a five gallon bucketful of ten or eleven inch perch. If it’s early June, here on Fish Fry Lake, you might want to prep by scaling, but not skinning, a small perch, then slicing off one and a half inch long, quarter inch wide slivers of cut bait. If you leave some skin on your slivers, when you hook this onto an eighth ounce, or thereabout depending on depth, jig head, the cut bait will survive on the hook for several fish, sometime even more before you need to rebait. The idea is to make catching seven or eight pounds of perch easy and

fast.

Then you set up on one of the two large floating islands on either end of Fish Fry. The islands have walkways and benches built into them, so fisherpeople are comfortable. There’s always a shady spot. And the islands are by far the most productive fishing locations on the lake.

You might start with a spinning rod setup, usually six pound test line which helps on those occasions you need to straighten the jig’s wire hook to break away from a brush or branch snag. You might also want to have a simple cane pole on hand too, because with perch, within limits, activity tends to feed upon itself. As you start catching fish, more fish happen. And the cane pole, with the same jig head system, although I’d suggest squeezing the hook’s barb down just a bit since this expedites de-hooking fish, provides for fast harvest. And maybe lifting a fish up versus pulling a fear pheromone-releasing fish through a swarm of unhooked fish might also help keep the bite humming.

So you flip the cut bait out, and wait as it sinks. Just as it gets near the bottom, or near the structure as in brush or weed bed, you lift the rod up and slowly move the presentation along the bottom. Typically, perch don’t hit hard. Any resistance and you ease up on the line, provide slack. Give the fish a moment or three to swallow the cut bait enough to be hooked, then set the hook and bring the fish in.

Even a two pound perch isn’t a heart pounding battle. Not with six pound test line. But with a light rod, or a cane pole, they are fun, as well as beautiful, and delicious. And, about one percent of the perch biomass is phosphorus. By harvesting we are actually engaged in the food chain, as we should be. If we forego this, the nutrients stack up and ultimately overwhelm any life system. As in “kill it”.

But right now, you flip the cut bait, or worm, or minnow,

whatever you’re using because it’s summertime, and the fish are biting. Sometimes it takes a few minutes to find right where they are focused. But once that’s figured out, then it builds. The bite is on.

Now is when the cane pole comes into its own. It might be twelve feet long, with nine feet of line. You drop it into the fish zone, watch your slack, and when the bait is interrupted, the fish is lifted straight up. Slow and steady. Loop it over to your waiting hands, and a few seconds later your rig is back and ready for more fish.

There are times on Fish Fry when the fishing is so fast that whoever’s sitting near the fish tub ends up not fishing, just de-hooking fish. A three person team can harvest a hundred pounds of perch in a half day.

Consider the following chart.

(THIS IS THE PHOSPHORUS REMOVAL COST CHART THAT WAS GENERATED IN MINNESOTA. MARK REINSEL HAS IT, BUT IT’S ON ALL OF OUR COMPUTERS IN SOME FORM.)

So our three fisherpeople have just saved someone a bunch of money. Realistically, there are limited practical ways to remove phosphorus. The lake can go through an alum treatment…and the cost and environmental hazard of such. And even then, know that aluminum ___________ ties up phosphorus and carries it to the lake bottom, where under the right conditions it can resurrect, but not in the form of fish. Think harmful algae bloom, or massive underwater weed beds.

Or the lake can hire a weedcutter to harvest weeds. Both are temporary fixes. They will need to be repeated, and they might not work. And the phosphorus, which is valuable in the right form, is squandered. This is not good stewardship folks. It is simply money out of pocket.

But our three fisherpeople caught 100 pounds of perch. This translates to about 40 pounds of perch fillets. This will provide the protein component of about 120 meals. Delicious meals. These are the bold gold, garney green perch that delight us. So with this model, the Fish Fry Lake model, those fisherpeople saved us, let’s be conservative, maybe $400 as they harvested one pound of phosphorus. And because there was an effective fish processing ability within twenty yards of the parking lot on the lake, the fish were all drum scaled and filleted in an hour, since our selfless de-hooker had also been be-heading and gutting fish as they were caught. So these folks had started fishing at 7 a.m., and they were heading to lunch at the local Café by 12:15 with forty pounds of perch fillets in their cooler. And along the way the scales, skeletons, and guts of the fish were further processed into fish brew which is the nutrient base of an extensive raised bed and orchard system adjacent to the lake.

And beyond all this mosquitoes weren’t a problem, because mosquito larvae don’t stand a chance in Fish Fry Lake. (but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen in association with flood irrigation practices throughout the area) The sun wasn’t too hot and it didn’t rain. It was a fun and productive morning for our fisherpeople, and they were from the neighborhood, their carbon footprint was small. Their fishing experience more than penciled out, and it really penciled out for the owners/managers of Fish Fry Lake.

IS 250 POUNDS OF FISH HARVEST PER ACRE REALISTIC?

The answer’s in the science. Let’s keep in mind that we are not talking about aquaculture: we are talking about stewardship. We are talking about understanding the nutrients you are being gifted with via your upstream neighbors, and transitioning them into fish instead of letting them transition into problems; problems like harmful algae blooms that can kill people, dogs, livestock. Or a wide range

of other less than desirable outcomes, like swimmer’s itch, massive weed beds, high fecal coliform populations, de-oxygenated water, stench, mosquitoes, disease, and whatever the language is that describes a high potential amenity that is instead a liability.

Consider that even primitive stewardship practices, like brush park fish culture, can grow on average 14,000 pounds of fish per acre. That’s 56 times more than we are suggesting given our 250 pound per acre fish harvest target.

How is it possible that primitive stewardship practices can outperform modern, first world technology? The short answer is that modern America has lost touch with nature’s model. We are very good at maximizing ground based agricultural production, at the expense of our public water. And the other part of the answer is so obvious that it’s sometimes hard to see...that it’s far easier to steward for fish than it is to grow produce. This is simply because most fish do not have to expend calories fighting gravity. They have built in buoyancy control systems, they can breathe underwater, and they are cold blooded, which means they also don’t have to expend calories in heating or cooling their core temperatures.

Some brush park fish culture systems report production of as much as 35 tons of fish per acre. With fish protein typically above 4O%, you can appreciate the potential. Why then hasn’t aquaculture exploded as a profitable enterprise? The easy answer is because aquaculture is not biomimetic. It doesn’t utilize a natural model. Instead, it is humans swimming upstream against a natural current that instead wants to carry us downstream toward a different place.

Aquaculture can’t make 250 pounds of fish per acre pencil out. Private water acreage is too expensive, and that’s just the first problem. But consider that 90 percent of fresh water, the world over, is public. What would happen if most of that water was generating 250 pounds of fish per acre?

And along with that new productivity, consider that every hundred pounds of fish saved us from having to spend a lot more money removing nutrients out of our waterways, so they stopped dying.

Today at Fish Fry Lake we are demonstrating how this can be. We can have the beauty, the ambiance, of clear water. Water that is swimmable, water you can snorkel and see the bottom at twenty feet. Water quality like that of Kiss Lake. We can have that with incredible fish abundance. Consider that today, about half of our lakes don’t produce five pounds of fish per acre. Consider that none of our conventionally managed lakes hit the 250 pound per acre level today. None.

Consider that Fish Fry Lake, arguably the best wild perch fishery in the region, only achieved a total of 120 pounds of fish harvest per acre last year. Roughly half of that magic 250 pound number.

Good news is we know how to get there. Let’s get ‘er done!