Remember the old psychological test used to determine if a person is an optimist or a pessimist? Set a glass, half filled with water in front of a person and have them indicate how much water is in the glass. A pessimist would say the glass is half empty, while an optimistic person would say the glass is half full. There's a sizeable contingent of Lake Michigan anglers these days who are seeing the prospects for the 2006 season on the big lake as a glass half empty. There is another group who are much more optimistic.

Why would this be? For the past three decades, the prognosis for each season of fishing on Lake Michigan has been mostly stellar. Looking back at the end of each season has shown a share of ups, downs and surprises, but on the whole, the successes far outweighed the failures. Why then, the mixed guesses about the 2006 season?

Part of the gloom comes from a series of events that are shedding a dark cloud over the big lake. Last fall, a meeting was convened where biologists and fisheries managers from each of the Lake Michigan states announced a drastic decline in alewife numbers and the concern that most of the chinooks in the lake are undernourished. (Alewives are the most abundant and the most favored forage fish for chinooks.) The agreed-upon solution to the problem is to cut the lakewide stocking of chinooks by 25 percent.

Another part of the gloom comes from the state of Michigan's decision to save money by cutting back on the number of coho salmon they stock. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Platte River Hatchery usually cranks out about 1.5 million baby cohos each year to stock into Lake Michigan. Financial difficulties had DNR officials looking for places to cut spending and precipitated hard choices in several areas. One of those hard choices was to eliminate the production of a million coho smolts from their stocking program.

Though all four of the Lake Michigan states produce some number of cohos to stock in Lake Michigan, the total output from Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana hatcheries collectively is about a million fish. Indiana's contribution is a paltry 225,000 fish compared with the other states. (Cont'd)

Though Michigan's fish are stocked in the Platte River, Michigan stocked fish are an important component of the catch recorded here in Indiana. To realize this, one must understand the life cycle of cohos in Lake Michigan.

Since all of Michigan's cohos are stocked in the Platte River, that's the only river in the state to host a fall run of spawning fish. Each October, some of the spawning fish are collected by fisheries biologists, stripped of eggs and milt and the fertilized eggs start a new generation of Great Lakes cohos. The eggs hatch in a few weeks and the tiny fry are nurtured for a year in the hatchery until they are old enough and large enough (usually around 7 inches in length) to be planted into the river.