By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

FAIRPORT HARBOR, Ohio — The Grandon is a research vessel plying the waters of Lake Erie. The reel creaks and groans as the crew lets the net down into the depths. What they pull out helps to determine bag limits for perch and walleye. As of May 1 the 2010 limit in Ohio waters is six walleye and 30 perch.

The Grandon operates out of the Fairport Harbor; its sister vessel, the Explorer II, is stationed at the Sandusky Fisheries Unit; funding is from the ODNR Division of Wildlife (from Ohio hunting and fishing license sales and a rebate on a federal tax on fishing equipment and boat motor fuels). The mission is to assess and manage the fish populations and fisheries in Lake Erie’s Central and Western basins and their tributary streams. Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania each have a research station and Ontario has two.

The Grandon, typical of all of the research vessels, trawls for fish four to five days a month. They spend about that same amount of time sampling the water chemistry and zooplankton, and other things in the food web, said Kevin Kayle, fisheries biology supervisor at the Fairport Harbor Fisheries Research Station.
“When we access the health of Lake Erie, we have to understand not only the fish, but what the fish are eating, and where the fish live,” he said.

“Within our greater body, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, we pool our information with these other research stations so that we can manage specific species like yellow perch walleye, some of the cold water species, the forage fish species, so that we can – with the case of yellow perch and walleye – set quotas for those species and manage them on a year-to-year basis,” Kayle said.

The Grandon, so named because that was the original name given to the town of Fairport Harbor on the Grand River, is 45-feet long, weighs 45 tons, and is powered by one caterpillar diesel engine; top speed is about 8 knots. It trawls in the central basin of the lake.

“One of the reasons we decided to go with this kind of trawler design is it has a very big sampling platform, and it is stable during rough weather,” Kayle said. “As everybody knows Lake Erie can get quite rough.”

When they reach the correct transect in the lake, the crew of biologists and technicians lets out the trawl, which measures 30 by 35 feet with an eight foot opening, Kayle said. After five to ten minutes they retrieve the trawl; the fish species are put on ice and go back to the lab for research involving abundance, growth, age, diet, and health.

“What we want to understand is what’s going on as soon as these fish hatch out to the point of where they’re out there and of a size where people can harvest them for their dinner fare,” Kayle said.
“The biggest controlling factor we see isn’t the adults,” Kayle said. “All we need is a few million adults – each female has about 50 to 80 thousand eggs each. So it is not uncommon for us to have hundreds of billions of eggs laid every year. It is what happens after the eggs are laid and those larvae pop out.”

The spring of 2010 was looking good for yellow perch – until the storm came.

“It’s cold, and it’s blowing 10 foot waves out here,” Kayle said.
“We know that might be one causative factor as to why we might not have a good hatch this year. It’s like dominoes. You have to get all the dominoes lined up just right. We know it’s not the numbers of eggs being laid or the number of spawners. It’s what happens afterwards.”

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“It is important for us to know from these trawls what kind of hatches we have from year to year because that will tell us two years down the line how those fish recruit into the fishery,” he added.