May 15, 2008
This spring brought the usual plaintive e-mails and telephone calls from readers asking if anyone knew where smelt were running. And the answer was the same as it has been for 10 years -- no one has seen any, and if you find some, please let the rest of us know.
It turned out that one exception was the northern Lake Huron coastline along the Canadian shore and the adjacent St. Marys River, where dippers enjoyed some excellent smelt runs.
That raised hopes that the silvery little fish might be making a comeback and provide spring sport for people and food for Lake Huron salmon whose numbers have been decimated by the disappearance of alewives.
Jeffrey Schaeffer, a research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey Great Lakes Science Center in Ann Arbor, has a different theory and says anglers shouldn't get their hopes up.
Smelt numbers have shown a slight increase in Lake Huron with the large decrease in the chinook salmon population. But Schaeffer said he thinks the smelt run in northern Lake Huron and the St. Marys, which connects Lakes Huron and Superior, was the product of an unusual spring weather pattern.
"The smelt all ran at once instead of over a period of weeks," Schaeffer said. "We went up a week before that run and everything was covered in ice. Then it got really warm and all melted with a rush, and the smelt run began. But it was all compressed into five days and then it was over."
Schaeffer added that the increased smelt numbers probably won't help Lake Huron salmon much. The lake's food web has become so thin that the smelt aren't growing past six inches and don't supply the fat-rich diet that salmon used to get from alewives.
But smelt can make an amazing recovery from disaster if the habitat is right. That was shown in the winter of 1942-43 when smelt, then a major commercial fishery, were nearly exterminated from Lake Huron and Michigan, apparently by a disease that wasn't identified,
The population did not begin to show signs of recovery until 1945, and by the mid-1950s had returned to previous levels.
Eric Sharp
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