If you like to fish in Michigan’s lakes, you could be a help to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. WKAR’s Katie Cook reports.
An angler is another word for someone who fishes. If you didn’t know that, you’re not alone.
“It’s so interesting, the Michigan DNR did a survey of did people know what we meant when we said ‘anglers,’ and they thought we meant ‘mathematicians.’”
That’s Tracy Claramunt, a fisheries biologist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
She runs a program that surveys anglers about their fishing trips: how long they fished for, what they caught, what they had hoped to catch, what they kept, and what they threw back. It’s called a creel survey program.
“The world creel comes from the name of an old-fashioned basket that fishermen used to keep their catch in, and creel clerks were people who would walk up to the fisherman and say ‘can I look in your creel and see what fish you caught?’ And we’re sort of the modern day equivalent of that program.”
So, why do they want to know these things?
“This information is so important to the Michigan DNR,” Claramunt says.“We use it to form the basis for all of our inland and Great Lakes management plans. We use the data to evaluate our regulations that we set, so for instance, size limits, or seasonal closures, or bag limits, how many fish you can keep per day.”
They also want to know this information for stocking purposes. The DNR has hatcheries across the state and they can place a species of fish in a lake that needs more of that species. Then the creel clerks continue to survey anglers in the area to evaluate the results. Claramunt says Lake Michigan is an interesting example.
“The people who fish Lake Michigan prefer a salmon fishery, and we’ve had a rising amount of lake trout sort of flood the area in the past few years. So we’ve seen that in the creel data, anglers who would like to see more salmon and less of the lake trout.”
The creel clerks ask for ages and zip codes of anglers too. Tracking age helps them measure their success at recruiting young people to the sport. Tracking where anglers live and how far they drive to go fishing also helps the DNR work with popular fishing towns to invest more in their fishing opportunities.
And in case you’re wondering, creel clerks are only interested in information. Claramunt wants you to know they are not enforcement officers.
“We’re not there to enforce whether or not you’re fishing with a license, in fact we’ll never even ask or know, and if you are violating a regulation, so somebody maybe brought in more fish than they were allowed or had smaller fish, we’ll let them know, in case they didn’t know about the regulation. But we won’t enforce it or report them. We are truly there to capture the information as it is.”
The enforcers of the DNR are the Conservation officers. They’re like natural resource police officers, and their uniforms look like police uniforms, unlike the creel clerks.
“Our creel clerks are in Michigan DNR t-shirts and baseball caps and they’re carrying a clipboard and they’re not interested in enforcing a regulation.”
Claramunt says people don’t always know this.
“Sometimes I’ll have creel clerks who are waiting to take an interview, they see a boat coming and the boat starts to get closer and sees the DNR person and drives the other way and I want to say ‘no, no, no, we’re not here to check your fishing license, we just want the data.”
So, if you’re coming in from a day fishing in one of Michigan’s lake this summer and you see someone standing on the shore with a clipboard, consider spending a minute to help them with their survey. It just might end up coming back to you in the form of salmon.
Visit the DNR’s website hereto search their creel data and see how much people are fishing and what they’re catching in a given area.
