(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa D-N-R says its spring efforts to collect walleye eggs to raise the next generation of fish was one of the fastest in the program’s history. Jay Rudacille oversaw the operation at Lake Rathbun and says all the fisheries seemed to benefit from warmer water temperatures during the spawn. “Most of our walleyes get stocked as just one to two day old fish that are very small and they have a fairly low survival rate, but we can we can produce them very cheaply and we can produce them in mass. So it’s an easy thing to do,” he says. Other walleyes are kept around a little longer before being released.

“We will raise fish to an inch and a half size and we will stock those about the first two weeks of June. And those are mostly stocked in rivers, and then we will raise some fish to the eight to nine-inch size at both our Rathbun and Spirit Lake hatcheries, and those get stocked into constructed and natural lakes in the month of October and early November,” Rudacille says. Rudacille says their goal is to have 116 million walleye fry. He says that’s believe to be second only to Minnesota, which looks to stock 257 million walleye. Rudacille is the D-N-R Warm and Coolwater Fish Culture Supervisor, and says Iowa doesn’t grow all the fish it stocks here in the state. He says they do a lot of fish trading with other states.

“Yellow perch from South Dakota. We will be providing some muskellunge to back to South Dakota and we’ll be sending some down to the state of Missouri. In exchange for those muskies that we send down to Missouri, in return, we’re going to get channel catfish and also paddlefish. So, there is a fair amount of fish trading,” he says. The fish trading is somewhat similar to the old kids card game “Go Fish” as he says if Iowa has more of one fish than it needs, they can trade for something they don’t have. “We don’t necessarily want to duplicate efforts, so if a state is very good at producing a certain species and we can have something to give them an exchange for that, there’s no real reason for us necessarily to go through the learning curve to try to develop a program for that same species,’ Rudacille says.

There is little natural reproduction of walleyes in most Iowa lakes and rivers, and Rudacille says keeping the population of those fish up depends on the stockings.