Note Your answers to the questions below should follow the expectations for homework found here.


Lake Mille Lacs Walleye

The Minnesota DNR convened a blue-ribbon panel to determine whether the data available from Lake Mille Lacs supported a variety of hypotheses about why the fish population declined. The report from the blue-ribbon panel is available here in long form or here as a summarized set of presentation slides. Use these resources to answer the questions below.

  1. How did regulations managing the harvest of Walleye (Sander vitreus) change around 2000?
  2. What were two abiotic and three biotic factors that may affect Walleye populations that changed dramatically in the late 1990s or early to mid 2000s?
  3. What were the four working hypotheses that the blue-ribbon panel addressed?
  4. For one of the working hypotheses, summarize the panel’s findings, both with some details and with their overall conclusion about the probability that that hypothesis contributed to the decline of the Lake Mille Lacs Walleye population. Your summary should at least comment on their findings for each sub-hypothesis.
  5. What recommendations did the panel make for data collection?
  6. What recommendations did the panel make for fisheries management?