By Louie Stout
Indiana biologists weren’t overly concerned when they didn’t find many young-of-the-year walleye at Lake of the Woods last fall.
When walleye are stocked (1 to 2 inches) during the spring, fish managers go back to the lake in the fall to assess survival of those young fish.
Lake of the Woods is a 416-acre lake near Bremen, Indiana.
District Fisheries Biologist Courtney Weldon said her crew didn’t find many of the young walleye stocked in the spring, but wasn’t ready to say the stocking was a bust.
“There were some habitat changes – starry stonewart is now in the lake – and we saw a lot of predatory fish in there when we surveyed it last summer,” she said. “Also, we suspect there were a lot of young walleye in a foot of water where we couldn’t get to them with our electro-fishing boat.”
Starry Stonewart is a nasty exotic plant that grows so thick fish can’t hide in it.
On the brighter side, Weldon noted that last summer’s survey produced a lot of adult walleye from 11 to 22.9 inches.
“We hope to do more consistent surveys there, but the fish population overall seems very healthy,” Weldon added.
There also were numerous adult panfish, such as bluegill, redear and pumpkinseed as well as black crappie. Plenty of bass were prominent, too.
“We saw a good abundance of bluegill up to 9½ inches, pumpkinseed over 8 and redear in the 8-inch range,” she said. “We found black crappie up to 12 inches.”
The lake also has a plentiful white bass fishery and there has been an invasion of white perch that look similar to a white bass. While those species typically don’t get above 8 inches, Weldon found several larger ones in the lake.
“It’s a good place to fish for bluegills, redear and sunfish,” she insisted.