(upbeat music) - Hello, welcome to "Illinois Stories."

I'm Mark McDonald on Spring lake in Tazewell County, North of Havana.

Where an annual activity is going on here and you don't get to see this very often.

What we're doing here, Wayne Herndon our fisheries biologist from Illinois Department of Natural Resources, has brought us out here to show us how they capture musky annually, take the eggs and the milt from them, in order to spawn the muskies for the fisheries statewide here.

Now, if you're not familiar with muskelles, or muskies, or muskellunge, which you may hear them called, they're like the top of the food chain in sports fish.

These are the big guys with the big teeth, and some of these would be 3, 4, 5 feet long, and they get 'em here in spring lake, bring 'em in to the fish hatchery, take the eggs and the milt, and that's when the spawning process starts.

So we're gonna take you through that process today, with the help of Wayne Herndon and his fellows here from the DNR, they're gonna show us how it's done.

Wayne we've run a couple of nets.

We're on the third one now, it looks like we're gonna have some luck on this one, huh?

- I think so.

Yeah, this is set over spring and the females will tend to move into the spring to hold until the water temperature of the lake is right.

- These are called trap nets that were looking at here.

- [Wayne] That's correct.

They have a trap front and a round back, and the lead is set from the shoreline out to the trap.

- [Mark] Okay.

- They're gonna pull these.

- [Mark] Looks like we're gonna see.

Yeah, there's some action here.

And who's helping us here in this, in this boat over there?

- [Wayne] Steve Kruger at the front and he's the hatchery manager.

And then we have Tom Blessman who is a resource technician at the hatchery, then Rob Hilsaback and he's a biologist.

- [Mark] Okay, yeah, we'd like to see that fish.

Oh my goodness.

Now if we can get a little closer, oh yeah.

- [Wayne] The reason we have so many fish in this net is because the males sense the females, and they move in and surround the female, hoping to spawn with her.

So we have probably three or four males and a single female.

- [Mark] I see.

Okay.

So they're fighting over her, huh?

- [Wayne] That's correct.

- [Mark] Now, do they spawn in here?

Do you have successful spawns in Spring lake?

- [Wayne] No, we've never had successful natural recruitment in Spring lake that we're aware of.

Musky have a very particular set of circumstances that they need to spawn, and we don't, we can't do that here.

- So these muskies all have to be stocked in here.

spawned elsewhere and stocked in here.

- That's correct.

They're sort of an exotic trophy fish here.

(boat engine rumbling) - [Mark] Okay, let's take a look at one of these.

Okay.

now that's a musky, Isn't it Wayne?

- [Wayne] Yes, that's musky.

- [Mark] Can you tell by looking whether that's a male or a female?

- [Wayne] Nope.

I'd imagine it's probably a male.

- [Man] Female - [Mark] A little female.

- [Wayne] Female.

- [Mark] When you say a little, how little are we talking about?

- [Wayne] Oh, that particular fish is probably about 35, 36 inches.

- [Mark] And so that's a three foot Musky is little, huh?

(Mark chuckles) - [Wayne] Well, according to the great realm of musky fishing, yeah, 50 inch muskies are what most fishermen are after.

- [Mark] I see, okay.

- [Wayne] But it's a magic figure that is kind of mythical.

(Wayne chuckles) - [Mark] Uh huh.

Wayne we've crossed the lake and I think you said it's deeper on this side, huh?

So usually there's more fish over here?

- Well, the females tend to come to this side to spawn in these rocks here, so yeah.

- It looks like we're pulling something in there now.

If we can get a little closer, maybe we can see, see what we got there.

Look at the mouth, look at the mouth on her.

Now that's a Female, does that look like a female there?

- [Wayne] Yes, that does.

- [Mark] Oh boy.

What's that smaller one that were putting in.

- [Wayne] It's a channel catfish.

- [Mark] Channel catfish.

- [Wayne] Yes.

- [Mark] What will you do with the channel catfish?

- [Wayne] Well, they'll probably throw him back.

- [Mark] Oh, I see, okay.

You just dump everything in there and decide later on what you'll do.

- [Wayne] Well, yeah, we sort the fish that we need in the hatchery, and then of course, everything else goes right back.

The musky that we're spawning actually will be back swimming in this lake probably later today or tomorrow.

- [Mark] No kidding.

- [Wayne] Yeah.

So it's a short trip for them.

(Mark chuckles) Only about a mile from the hatchery, so it's a very convenient source of brewed fish.

- [Mark] Yeah.

Oh, now Wayne that looks like a net full doesn't it?

- [Wayne] Yeah, that was a pretty good net.

Some of these nets at times we've had 20, 25 fish in, not the smaller nets, but you'll see some bigger nets that we fish as well.

And those sometimes with good fishing day, they'll have 20, 25 fish in them.

- [Mark] Uh huh.

And again, they sometimes get caught in there.

They get caught in the net a little bit, don't they?

- [Wayne] Yeah they do.

Their teeth hang up in then mesh, and sometimes they're a little difficult to get shaken out.

- [Mark] Okay, Wayne, we're almost through with the nets for the day, but kind of surprised us, didn't we?

- [Wayne] It's rock of the draw, there's one big female in there, and she has lots of little males with her, little males that are ready to fertilize her eggs.

- [Mark] Oh my goodness.

That's a handful, isn't it?

These guys have to be strong too, don't they?

- [Wayne] Yeah.

- [Mark] That is a lot of fish.

- [Wayne] It's a work out.

There are no weak commercial fisherman, I don't think.

(mark laughs) - [Wayne] Yeah, that was a very good net.

- [Mark] Okay Wayne, we're about halfway through with the nets, but not what you have to do is offload these, these muskies that you've got here.

Now, that's a big fish there.

Isn't it?

- [Wayne] Yep, it's a female.

- [Mark] And these are unloaded by hand into the tank on the truck, and that frees up your space, so when you go back out, you've got enough tank space to bring some more fish in.

- [Wayne] That's correct.

- [Mark] Look at those there.

Boy those things are heavy.

- [Wayne] Some of these bigger females weigh 20 to 25 pounds and they'll produce about a liter of eggs or so.

- [Mark] Now this is the process before we go to the hatchery.

You say that some of these female are flowing eggs.

And what we'll get to see at the hatchery is actually the way, I guess they take the eggs from the flowing females and start the spawning process.

So that's what we're gonna do next.

- [Wayne] That's correct.

- [Mark] Well, listen, thanks so much for taking us out.

- [Wayne] Well, you're more than welcome.

- [Mark] It's a beautiful morning, thank you.

- [Wayne] Yep.

- [Mark] And everybody on your crew.

This a good fishing day.

Well, Steve Kruger, we have brought the fish in from the lake.

We got 'em off the truck, they're in a holding tank now, in fact, there's some splashing going on there.

The first thing you wanna do is you've isolated the males, - Correct.

- [Mark] And you wanna take some of the sperm from the male.

- Right, We wanna take the semen out of individual males and we collect it in test tubes, then we put it on ice.

And then once we get enough semen for the females that we're gonna spawn, then we bring it over and then we'll actually add the milt onto the eggs, fertilize the eggs and voila we have baby muskies.

- [Mark] So, what's going on over here now?

- [Steve] So what's happening right now is David Parrish has a male, male musky in his hands.

And he's kind of gently squeezing on the bottom of the fish, the vent part of the fish.

And then Mark Sardy has got an aspirator and he's actually kind of suctioning that milt, the semen into a test tube.

He'll probably get somewhere between two and three milliliters, which is millions and millions of individual semen cells, and then we'll take that and we'll put it on ice to keep it cool until we need it.

- [Mark] Okay.

And then while we're viewing this today, we get a chance to see how you actually mix the milt with the eggs.

- [Steve] Exactly.

- [Mark] But is it, is there some sort of special environment that you do this in, or is this pretty simply done?

- [Steve] Most important thing right now when we're taking the milt from the male, is to make sure that it's kept neat, there's no water contamination, Coz right now the individual cells are just sitting there, they're doing absolutely nothing.

And even when we pour them onto the eggs, when the eggs don't have any water, they're just doing nothing.

But as soon as you add water to that mixture, all of a sudden those cells start swimming like crazy, trying to find that little tiny, it's called a micro pile in the egg, that they swim into in order to fertilize the egg.

So right now it's just sitting there waiting to find an egg to fertilize.

And we'll show you how to do that in just a moment.

- [Mark] Okay.

And now he's gonna take that and then I guess he's gonna put it on ice, huh?

- [Steve] Correct.

We just try to keep it cool.

We don't want it to warm up too much.

Right now the temperature of the fish is about, we're keeping these fish at about 54 degrees which is slightly above what the lake temperature is.

We just want to keep it about that same temperature if we can.

We don't want it to warm up, so we'll just keep it on ice for a little while.

Little bit later on, we'll take a sample of the semen, put it on a microscope slide and then check it to make sure that it's not already active and swimming around.

'Cause once we add water to this, those cells only have about a minute to find an egg and fertilize it.

And if you don't get it within a minute, they're gonna run out of energy and they don't have the energy to actually penetrate the egg, fertilize it.

- [Mark] Fascinating.

- That's pretty cool actually.

It's a neat process, it really is.

- [Mark] Okay, Steve.

Now one of the females that we just brought in from the lake you say is flowing eggs and we're taking a look at her right now.

- [Steve] Yes, sir.

- [Mark] Okay, how do you know she's flowing eggs?

- [Steve] Well, actually when we trap netted her and we brought her into the boat, actually eggs were coming out of the vent in her belly when we did that.

So we know that she is ready to spawn and that's what we're gonna do.

We're gonna capture her now this crib, we try to do it as gently as possible.

And then we actually, these are such powerful fish that we have the loader into this harness, in order for Dave to keep a hold of her.

This is really a three man operation, one to hold the fish, one to hold the tail, and another person, you know, sometimes holds the head and then Dave is gonna push on the vent or her belly in order to get all the eggs out of her.

- [Mark] Okay.

- [Steve] And we hope to get somewhere in the neighborhood of maybe two liters of eggs, which will match up maybe 80,000 eggs in her.

- [Mark] Now you say that's such a powerful fish.

Once they pull her out of the water, her true weight is gonna be felt.

What do you think that fish would weigh for instance?

- [Steve] She probably weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 20, 22 pounds.

I will actually weigh her when we're done, and then we can kind of back calculate by adding the weight of the eggs and know how much she weighed, when, before she actually spawn.

- [Mark] Okay, so she goes from there into a harness and that's how they'll be able to hold her, huh?

- [Steve] And the key to this whole process is keeping her as dry as possible, so there's no water on the eggs.

We wanna collect the eggs so they're nice and dry.

If there's water on the eggs the eggs start to deteriorate, and then it'll also fertilize the eggs earlier than we want.

- [Mark] I see, okay.

Wow, now what are we seeing come out very fast?

- [Steve] Okay, they just have the vent on the female and Dave's just gently pushing on her abdomen, and he's collecting, Brenda's holding the bowl, and we're collecting eggs.

- [Mark] And those are eggs that are coming out there.

Huh?

- [Steve] Exactly.

- [Mark] And they have a very yellow color too.

- [Steve] Most of the time they're quite yellow.

- [Mark] Now see her, his right hand.

He's pushing.

It really takes some strength to push that down toward the, - [Steve] It's amazing the muscular strength in those fish.

There's two belly muscles there and it takes quite a bit of strength to push those eggs out.

Sometimes they flow a little more easily than you're seeing right now, but it takes a lot of strength.

- [Mark] And I think you might have said how many eggs you might get, but I forgot.

How many eggs are we talking about?

- [Steve] With a fish this size, we could easily get two liters of eggs, and that's probably gonna be in the neighborhood of 75 to 85,000 eggs.

- [Mark] Oh my goodness.

Now she's not fighting or if she is, we're not seeing it, is this something that kind of puts them into a daze or something?

- [Steve] I mean, Dave's gotta hold her pretty good.

And then Tom's up there holding the head and to, you know, Dave's holding the head.

So it's, they're trying to keep her as inactive as possible for both Dave's sake that's spawning her and the fish's sake.

- [Mark] How does he know when, when he's got it all?

- [Steve] Well, actually you can see how kind of pouchy the belly is when all the eggs are outta her, that will kind of sink in and you can tell that all the eggs are gone, when he's pushing and no eggs are coming out.

- [Mark] And when you said earlier, you could see that she was flowing eggs.

You could tell by just how pouchy her stomach was.

- [Steve] That and the fact that just by picking her up eggs were coming out her vent.

- [Mark] Oh my goodness, she was really ready to go.

- [Steve] She was definitely ready you to spawn in the lake.

And we're happy, it's nice to have fish that come in flowing rather than for us to have to inject a hormone in order to make them ovulate.

The quality of the egg that we get is much better when that happens.

This year, we've been very fortunate, all the eggs, all the females, excuse me, have either come in, ripe off the boat or once we bring 'em in here, they hang around here for a couple of days and then they start flowing.

- [Mark] And I noticed too, you said, that sometimes you'll bring females in that you have netted and brought in.

How long would you ordinarily maybe have to hold them before they're ready?

- [Steve] Oh, typically somewhere in the neighborhood of, we hope to be able to get them out within five days, say seven days, eight days.

- [Mark] My goodness, she's got a lot, she has a lot to go doesn't she?

- [Steve] We're flowing pretty good right now.

What takes us five minutes to do here would take her a lot less time in the lake.

- [Mark] Oh, is that right?

And she'd do it on her own, she wouldn't have to be massaged.

- [Steve] She'd pair up with another male, and then it would happen much quicker.

It's a nice, nice looking eggs right there.

And there's so many of 'em.

What we'll do then in a little once Dave's done is we'll separate those into two bowls.

And then you saw the spawning... You go ahead and just go ahead and keep doing it, what you're doing.

And then when it's all done, we'll separate, 'em into two bowls and then we've got those, the the milt in the test tubes.

Add the milt.

She good.

- [Mark] She's done excellent.

Steve, as we look at the muskies now in the tank, we're gonna see how you actually add the milt to the eggs, is that right?

- [Steve] Yes, sir.

- [Mark] You've split the eggs in half and you've got 'em in, in two bowls.

- [Steve] This is the female that Dave just spawned.

Because there's so many eggs, we separated it.

So we have a thinner layer of eggs, and then Rod and Brenda each have three vials of the milt that we just took a few moments ago.

It's been on ice.

So they're gonna go ahead and add it neat.

So right now there's no water on the eggs, there's no water on the milt.

They add the milt, stir it up a little bit.

Rod just rinse out the vials.

Brenda's doing the same.

Okay, now they're ready to add water to this.

As soon as the water hits that semen, all those million of semen cells in there, they start swimming like crazy, trying to find an egg to fertilize.

They're just very gently kind of stirring that up.

We wanna get that semen mixed up very well with all those eggs, so that we have good contact between the milt and the egg.

You could actually add more water than that if you would.

- [Mark] Little more water, okay.

Plus then this is from many males.

So what you've got is a homogenous bunch of sperm with the eggs from one female.

- [Steve] Exactly.

- [Mark] So you don't just get the same genetic turnout, I guess.

- [Steve] That's right.

Exactly, there were three males per female here.

So we try to maximize the genetic variability in this spawn.

- [Mark] Now how long will this have to sit like this before there's actually some activity?

That's happening right away.

- Exactly, we'll leave it like this for about two minutes, and by then the milt that has fertilized the eggs, I mean the whole fertilization process is done about two minutes.

And then what we'll do is we'll go set it out the way, so that these males don't knock the eggs out of the bowls, and then we'll just rinse the eggs once in about five minutes.

They'll stay in this water for about an hour while they water harden.

They absorb water, and once they do that, after about an hour they're a little more durable and then we'll actually measure them in a graduated cylinder, so we know exactly how many milliliters of eggs that we have, and then we'll move them into incubation.

And they'll be an incubation at 54 degrees, that's the temperature of the water that we're using, for somewhere around 10, maybe 12 days.

And then from there, we move them to some baskets out in the star tank room, takes 'em about another 10 days to swim up.

They use up their yolk sack that every fish has when it first hatches, and then after that, then we're ready to start feeding them.

- [Mark] And now for the males and the females that we've seen in here today, who've contributed their precious wherewithal here.

How long before they get turned back into the lake or back into the wild?

- [Steve] Well, we've had these guys for two days.

We're gonna be done spawning, we'll have taken somewhere in the neighborhood of a million eggs after this afternoon.

And all these are gonna go back to the lake this afternoon.

A good number of 'em are gonna go back to the lake this afternoon.

So we'll have held these fish anywhere from five to three days.

- Wow.

Steve, we left the spawning room and we came over to the incubation room.

- [Steve] Yes, sir.

- [Mark] And the eggs we're looking at he here are very recent aren't they?

- [Steve] Most of these were taken either the day before yesterday or yesterday, these were taken yesterday.

And basically, what you're looking at is every female is kept individually in a hatching jar.

So after those eggs that we just spawned, after they water harden which takes about an hour, then we bring them into incubation.

We would measure them in a graduated cylinder so that we know, like in this case, there was 800 mills of eggs taken from that female, then we'd go ahead and put them in the incubation jar and they're gonna stay, this is 54 degree water, this is our well water.

And they're gonna stay in this jar for approximately 10, as many as 11 day.

And then they'll go ahead and hatch.

And when they hatch, then we'll go ahead and take those and we'll move them to another room, put them in a basket so that we can keep track of exactly what happens with the spawn from that female.

- [Mark] Now I notice that some of these eggs look different than others of these eggs.

What's going on there?

- The eggs that are the white color, those are eggs that are dead.

And what happens is they turn white because the yolk inside the egg actually ruptures, and then the salt that's inside that yolk gets out into the water, so that's why they turn white like that.

The rest of them, not all of those are going to be viable or fertilized eggs, maybe anywhere from say, we'll just say 25 all the way up to maybe 80% will be good eggs.

And we'll know that in about a week.

- Yeah, and of course out in nature, they don't all survive either.

- No, all you need is two to survive in nature to make, you know, sustain the population.

We're gonna have much higher viability or survival rate in the hatchery than they are out in the lake, much higher.

- [Mark] Steve, just to illustrate what will happen to the musky eggs that we're seeing incubation.

We're looking at Northern Pike, and you spawn those a little earlier in the season.

So these are just a little bit older than your muskies would be, right?

- [Steve] Right, we took these actually the week before, we started with the musky this week, so these were spawned on the ninth and the 10th.

- [Mark] Man they almost look lifeless, so you have to shake the screen a little bit to get 'em to move around.

- [Steve] But once the egg hatches, once we get a fry with the Northern Pike, what's cool about the Northern Pike is we bring 'em into these baskets after they hatch.

And they actually have adhesive gland on their head, you can see where they're sticking to the sides of the basket.

- Yeah.

- We'll put little flappers in here, little screens in here and they'll go ahead and gather on that, and that's what they would do out in the wild, they would be caught on some vegetation.

So they kind of attach to that, And what they're doing actually is just kind of sitting there motionless.

They still have a yolk sack on 'em.

If you could see there's still a little tiny yolk sack on 'em.

So, they're really still continuing to develop for another 10 days, before they're ready to start feeding on Zooplankton or Rotifer, or in our case, on a prepared diet.

- [Mark] So these aren't, you're not feeding them yet, they're still using their yolk sack, and then when they use that up, then you'll start to feed them?

- Exactly.

They're still using their yolk as their energy source right now.

- Okay.

Now these little guys and these are very similar to muskies.

- Very much they're cousin to the musky.

- Yeah okay.

These little guys will be at this stage for how long?

- Well, they're gonna, you see how big they are now, they're about a quarter an inch.

We'll have these fish up to eight inches by the 1st of July.

And we'll produce somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 to 13,000 eight inch fish.

And they get stocked from Northern Illinois all the way down to about central Illinois.

The musky then very similar, they'll start at about this size and we'll produce around 20,000, 10 to 11 inch fish, and we'll have them ready to go somewhere between middle to late August.

- Now that means that the survival rate of these guys, or at least your ability to handle all those fish is not all that great.

Because I mean, we're talking, you'll have tens and tens and tens of thousands of fry here, what happens to them all?

- [Steve] That's a good question.

And a lot of the Northern Pike what we'll do is we're only gonna need, we'll start about 40,000 Northern Pike on feed.

The rest of these fry actually get stocked into Illinois river.

Wayne Herndon the district biologists that you were working with this morning, likes to stock Northern Pike in the Illinois trying to establish a population.

Any extra fry will go out into the river and then we'll start about 40,000.

We have very good survival of Northern Pike on feed.

And what we'll do is we start a lot more than we need, and then eventually we'll trade them.

Iowa, like some fish, so we'll trade them to Iowa.

'Cause what we have is a cooperative effort around states in the Midwest, that they don't get enough pike, we don't sometimes get enough musky, so we'll help them with pike, they help us with musky.

So we'll give them around 25,000 and then we stock some fish short.

We may stock 'em at three or four or six inches into some lakes that that could use it.

And then we'll end up at the end, basically at the end, we'll have that 11 to 13,000 eight inch fish available for stocking.

- You know, this has been really fascinating for us, because you put out your nets and you only started capturing these muskies less than a week ago.

- Exactly, like 10 days ago.

- Now you've finished capturing 'em, you're gonna take up your nets.

You've got the eggs, you've got the fertilization process gone, and now here we are.

It's amazing how quickly it all happens.

- And it's lucky for us that it does happen quickly, because we're always under a time constraint with the tank space and the water.

We need to keep things moving along, because first we did the Northern, then we bring in the musky, and then we'll bring in small mouth, and then we'll bring in large mouth, and in the mix we'll have walleye, striped bass, striped bass hybrids, so there's one thing after another with tank space in this room.

- Yep.

- And that's the same thing with all the cold water fish that we out here.

We get them out, and once we get them out that frees up water and space to start spawning the small mouth and the large mouth.

So it's a ripple effect, if one thing slows down, it really backs up everything else that we do here.

- Well Steve, thanks so much for taking the day.

And I'll tell you what, and not only you, the DNR crew that took us out in the boats and everything, your whole crew and your colleagues have been great.

Thank you.

- Well, we're successful because of the dedication and the hard work and the knowledge of the staff that works here.

It's a great bunch of people to work with.

- Thank you - Thank you.

- Back in mid winter, when we were here doing a story on these rainbow trout, they weren't much bigger than, than the Northern pike that you saw a moment ago.

These guys will be moved out next week outside, and then in May, they'll be shipped up to lake Michigan for the fishery up there.

All to make room for other species to grow here.

With another "Illinois Story" near Manito, I'm Mark McDonald.

Thanks for watching.

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