Liberty Lake Gets Some Slippery New Residents 27,500 Walle Planted To Reduce Perch Population
Without hesitating, Lindsey Wallingford pulled up the pant legs of her bright purple warmup suit, grabbed hold of a net brimming with flipping fish and rushed to the water’s edge.
The 9-year-old Liberty Lake girl helped the Spokane Walleye Club and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife release 27,500 six-month-old walleye into the 711-acre lake on Friday.
Biologists say the walleye will eat many of the small yellow perch that currently overpopulate the lake. The surviving perch will grow larger, as will the walleye, improving the lake’s mediocre fishing conditions.
“It’s an experiment on our part,” said Ray Duff, regional fish biologist for the Department of Fish and Wildlife. The entire project cost $13,000, of which the Spokane Walleye Club donated $1,000. Each fish cost 50 cents.
By this time next year, Duff hopes, the walleye will have doubled in size, from six to 12 inches. He’s also depending on the walleye to eat up the high number of pumpkin seed sunfish, which, like the perch, are too small to waste time catching.
“No one likes to catch a small fish,” said Duff. “By the time you’re done filleting the fish, there’s hardly any meat left.”
Duff said the lake’s rainbow trout, which at one time provided more than 40 percent of the annual trout catch in Spokane County, should also see dramatic growth and increase to 18 inches from the 6 to 10 inches they are now.
George Orr, president of the Spokane Walleye Club, said the lake cannot sustain the number of fish living in it, forcing the fish to compete for a limited amount of available food.
Before Liberty Lake was highly developed, the department would disperse rotenone, a natural chemical that’s toxic to fish, into the lake to decrease the number of fish. The dead fish would float in the water until sea gulls swooped them up or the carcasses disintegrated.
As more and more people made the resort area their year-round home, using rotenone became more of a problem. Homeowners didn’t like the stench or the sight of the dead fish and wanted the department to find another way to deal with the problem.
After several public hearings, Duff said the department decided to use predatory fish to kill off the smaller fish and enable other fish to grow in size and population. Biologists debated whether to stock the lake with walleye, Chinook salmon or tiger musky for the experiment and finally opted for the walleye.
The department’s first try was unsuccessful. Most of last spring’s shipment of 29,000 walleye fry died en route from Brandon, Minn., where they were hatched. All of those fish were two inches long. Duff said they decided to use more mature fish for the second attempt.
This time, workers from Brandon Fisheries kept an air gauge taped to the driver’s side window of the truck that was used to transport the fish. Using the gauge, the driver made sure the fish were getting sufficient oxygen.
Because of this shipment’s size and age, Orr said he and Duff expect 75 to 90 percent of the walleye to live through the winter.
“Those are some good, good-looking fish,” said Orr. “They’re big enough to survive this time.”
Lindsey Wallingford is hoping Orr is right.
She picked up a walleye that had fallen out of her net. She smiled as she ran her fingers along the fish’s yellow-and-black skin. Plunging her hands beneath the surface, she let go of the walleye.
Maybe, just maybe, she said, she’ll catch that one next year from the dock behind her house.
“The rainbow trout are prettier, but these are pretty too,” she said. “I’ll be catching ‘em.”
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