Lake Champlain State of the Lake Meeting
This meeting has been time-stamped and posted on YouTube. Just check out the “Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department” channel, or do a search on it, and it will come up. I pay attention to this meeting every year. There are biologists there from Vermont’s Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, New York’s DEC and also U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (the Feds.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSiEwiaCJDs
There are a lot of management similarities between the Finger Lakes – mainly Cayuga and Seneca Lakes and the management of Lake Champlain. Both lakes (thinking of the two largest Finger Lakes as one lake) are “two-story” fisheries, featuring lake trout (both stocked and wild), landlocked salmon and other salmonids. Both are nationally renowned bass fisheries. Both have storied histories of great fisheries and then habitat degradation, over-fishing, invasive species – notably lampreys, Dreissenid mussels, cormorants, waterfleas, gobies (in Seneca and Cayuga) and more.
Largely because of the involvement of USFWS plus the fact that Lake Champlain is located on the borders of two states (and Quebec,) it receives a lot of attention. Lamprey containment and eradication methods used here are cutting-edge. Landlocked salmon are a very important component of the fishery and a goal of the Feds in terms of restoration. You can be sure that issues and opportunities as well as new and successful methods used here to help manage the fishery will make their way over to the Finger Lakes.
They are now dealing with more wild lake trout production (Seneca Lake in the late-1980s/1990s anyone?) Alewives displacing rainbow smelt (we’ve had both here for a while), complaints about poor Landlocked salmon fishing/runs (Cayuga Lake – “hold my beer…”) and much more. Bottom line, is that if you’re interested in Finger Lakes fisheries, you’ll find this presentation informative, entertaining and fascinating. You also appreciate the Finger Lakes even more than you already do!