(Radio Iowa) – The effort to stock Iowa’s lakes and rivers with the popular walleye game fish is underway once again. The D-N-R’s Jay Rudacille they netted walleye and collected their eggs in 12 nights of work. “Our goal for quarts of eggs was one-thousand-173 (1,173). And we went a little bit over that and we collected one-thousand-254 (1,254). And so our goal for eggs, the one-thousand-173 quarts of eggs equates to 156 million walleye eggs,” he says.
The eggs were collected from fish in Rathbun Lake, Storm Lake, Spirit Lake and the Mississippi River. Rudacille says most of those eggs will hatch into fish. “The historical average would be anywhere from 70 to 75 percent,” he says. “And so we will be able to produce a little over 106 million walleye fry and stock those.” The eggs have an incubation period of 12 to 21 days.
“The vast majority of the walleyes are stocked just as one to two day old newly hatched fish. We keep some of those newly hatched fish on site and we will raise those to an inch and a half to two inch size and those get stocked in interior rivers across the state of Iowa, mostly in the northeast and northwest, but some in central Iowa,” Rudacille says.
He says they keep some of fish at the hatcheries until they are eight to nine inches in size and those will get stocked in lakes and reservoirs in October and November.
