Arctic grayling reintroduction moves forward with state and tribal partners

The Michigan Arctic Grayling Initiative (MAGI), begun in 2015, brings together anglers and other groups and governments. MAGI’s nearly 50 members include tribal partners such as the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, which had already started investigating streams in the Manistee River Watershed for potential Arctic grayling introduction.

MAGI and others have been working to understand and overcome the barriers to successful grayling reintroduction.

The 1980s reintroduction efforts raised fish in hatcheries and stocked them in rivers. But that didn’t allow the Arctic grayling to imprint to a stream.

Montana successfully restored Arctic grayling by placing screened buckets with fertilized eggs in suitable stream habitats, allowing newly hatched fish to imprint and larval and juvenile grayling to survive.

MAGI has solved many questions and met several milestones on the path to bringing Arctic grayling back:

• Identifying Alaska’s Chena River as a source of genetically diverse Arctic grayling.
• Building an isolation rearing facility at the Oden hatchery to prevent transfer of diseases from Alaska.
• Confirming through a Michigan State University-led study that Arctic grayling could coexist with brook trout but would face predation and competition from brown trout – information important to selecting streams to stock.
• Bringing the first eggs to Michigan in 2019 and moving them to the Marquette State Fish Hatchery as broodstock to supply eggs for future stocking. These, along with broodstock fish from 2021 and 2022, survived well.
• Stocking 400 Arctic grayling at Alger County’s West Johns Lake, 300 at Houghton County’s Penegor Lake, and 1,105 in Manistee County’s Pine Lake in November 2023. Although grayling cannot be possessed legally in Michigan, the initiative wanted the public to be able to fish for grayling in a few lakes while stream reintroduction plans are in the works.

Meanwhile, similar efforts are underway to restore river-spawning populations of lake whitefish – the Great Lakes’ most important commercial fishery. Their numbers in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron their numbers have fallen for 15 years, threatening the future of the fishery and a Michigan cultural touchstone – especially for Indigenous communities.

Densities of zooplankton the young fish rely on have declined in the two lakes because of invasive quagga mussels filtering out nutrients.

Lake whitefish spawn in the Great Lakes, but historically many also migrated up rivers in the fall and spawned in rocky riffles and rapids.

In the spring, the hatched whitefish would drift downstream into ideal nursery habitat: zooplankton-rich Great Lakes river estuary waters.

Like salmon and Arctic grayling, lake whitefish imprint on and return to the place where they hatched to spawn.

Most lake whitefish spawning runs were lost during Michigan’s logging era as rocky habitat filled with sediment and dams blocked migration upstream. Few contemporary populations now migrate upstream.

In Michigan, biologists from the Bay Mills Indian Community, Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and The Nature Conservancy are studying reestablishing river spawning runs in Michigan.

The partners have conducted fall surveys in Lake Michigan and northern Lake Huron tributary rivers since 2018 to identify remnant river populations and to find habitats that might best support reintroduction.

Since 2022, eggs and young lake whitefish have been introduced into select tributaries to study feasibility and determine how stocked juveniles fare.

Outcomes from these efforts will provide impactful recommendations for restoring tributary lake whitefish runs in the future, expanding efforts to bring back the lake whitefish.

Adapted from articles by Jay Wesley of DNR and Matt Herbert of The Nature Conservancy in the 2024 Michigan State of the Great Lakes Report.