Relationship between Alewife Abundance and Yellow Perch Recruitment in Southern Lake Michigan

Abstract

We examined the relationship between the abundance of alewives Alosa pseudoharengus and the recruitment of yellow perch Perca flavescens to determine if alewives were potentially responsible for yellow perch recruitment failures in southern Lake Michigan after 1988. We used annual June-August bottom trawl data from two 5-m-depth index sites near Michigan City, Indiana, during 1984Indiana, during -1998 to index alewife abundance as the catch per unit effort (CPUE) of age-1 and older fish and yellow perch recruitment as the CPUE of age-2 fish. The relationship between alewife abundance and yellow perch recruitment was modeled as log e R tϩ2 ϭ 11.7 Ϫ (2.12) log e A t , where log e R tϩ2 is the natural log of the CPUE of age-2 yellow perch in year t ϩ 2 and log e A t is the natural log of the CPUE of alewives age 1 and older in year t. The model explained greater than 70% of the variability in recruitment of the 1984-1996 yellow perch year-classes. We conclude that yellow perch year-class failures in Indiana waters of Lake Michigan were largely explained by an increase of mean alewife abundance after 1988 and that the yellow perch fishery is unlikely to fully recover unless mean alewife abundance returns to an extremely low level, similar to the early 1980s.

Changes in zooplankton community structure associated with the disappearance of invasive alewife in Saginaw Bay, Lake Huron

“…Despite the increase in abundance of this large cladoceran, the small-bodied cladoceran Bosmina longirostris remained the dominant species in the bay, likely reflecting relatively high predation demands in the system despite release from alewife planktivory (Brooks 1968;Evans and Jude 1986;Post et al 2008). An indirect impact of reduced alewife could have been an increase in age-0 yellow perch as observed in other systems (Shroyer and McComish 2000). Yellow perch can exert considerable pressure on large zooplankton prey (Mills and Forney 1983) and our coarse analysis of environmental factors on an annual basis indicates that both yellow perch and alewife were strongly associated with annual patterns in zooplankton community structure.…”

Measures of larval lake whitefish length and abundance as early predictors of year-class strength in Lake Michigan

“…Five major hypotheses, each pertinent to a particular life stage, have been advanced as potentially influencing recruitment of yellow perch (Table 2). Of these five hypotheses, those focusing on zooplankton and spawning-stock characteristics have been researched the most during 2000. Shroyer and McComish (2000 observed a negative correlation between alewife abundance and yellow perch recruitment in southern waters, which may have resulted from alewife predation on larval yellow perch (Brandt et al 1987) or from competition for zooplankton between alewife and larval yellow perch.…”

Population genetic diversity and phylogeographic divergence patterns of the yellow perch (Perca flavescens)

“…Yellow perch became more abundant during the 1980s and then markedly declined during the 1990s through the early 2000s, variously attributed to fluctuating phosphorous levels, recruitment failures, overexploitation, and influence of exotic species - Lee et al, 1980), our sampling sites (lettered according to Table 1), distribution of yellow perch mtDNA control region haplotypes (numbered per Table 2) among the sites, and hypothesized colonization pathways from glacial refugia (arrows, adapted from Mandrak and Crossman, 1992), (b) sampling sites in Lake Erie, with boundaries of Lake Erie management units (MUs 1-4 per GLFC, 2006). including the white perch and alewife Alosa pseudoharengus (Shroyer and McComish, 2000;Ryan et al, 2003;Lauer et al, 2008). The Lake Michigan yellow perch fishery collapsed in 1990 (Fulford et al, 2006) and has not yet fully recovered (Marsden and Robillard, 2004;GLFC, 2008a).…”