Biology, Management, and Culture of Walleye and Sauger

Chapter 13: Culture of Walleye, Sauger, and Hybrid Walleye

Robert C. Summerfelt, J. Alan Johnson, and Chris P. Clouse

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781934874226.ch13

The current chapter presents a historical perspective and a comprehensive literature review of the cultural technology for walleye, sauger, and hybrid walleye (saugeye, the F1 cross usually between male sauger × female walleye). The chapter focus is on practices for production of fry and fingerling fish needed for resource management that will integrate with topics presented in several other chapters.

We acknowledge that an expansive body of experience by agency personnel and scientific literature already exists on the biology and culture of walleye that spans the 20th century and has been growing ever since. Hynes (1986) authored a manual for pond culture of walleye based on practices of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources White Lake Fish Culture Station in eastern Ontario. The 82 authors of the Walleye Culture Manual (WCM) provided a broad yet comprehensive perspective of walleye culture in 16 chapters covering 47 case studies at production hatcheries from 11 states and 3 Canadian provinces (R. Summerfelt 1996a). The WCM demonstrates that walleye culture is based on a broad foundation of basic and applied research by many investigators in North America as noted in several reviews (Nickum 1978, 1986; Nickum and Stickney1993; Krise and Meade 1986; Kestemont and Mélard 2000; Summerfelt 2000a, 2000b, 2005, 2006). Additional information on the culture of walleye and its European counterpart, the zander, or pikeperch, was given in the Workshop on Aquaculture of Percid Fish, Vaasa, Finland, in August 1995 (Kestemont and Dabrowski 1996) and again in two international percid fish symposia, PERCIS II in 1995 (PERCIS II 1996) and PERCIS III in 2003 (Barry and Malison 2004). The PERCIS meetings included aquaculture, ecology, and management of walleye, zander (pikeperch), and both the North American yellow perch and European perch. The proceedings of the annual meetings of the Coolwater Fish Culture Workshop, not easily accessible, provide insight into issues and practical solutions to cultural problems reported by hatchery biologists from a cross-section of North America.