This has produced a population that is lower in abundance, composed of smaller fish overall, and with a male biased sex ratio. To address these concerns the management agencies and academic institutions that border Lake Michigan asked the Yellow Perch Task Force of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission to develop a multi-agency research initiative to elucidate factors possibly responsible for the decline. Management agencies have increased fishery-independent monitoring to provide baseline data. The academic research response has been to develop a series of coordinated Sea Grant projects involving scientists from Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland and North Carolina. The coordination between the different groups is a central feature of the research.
Individual groups can only sample a limited geographic area at the temporal resolution required.
However, by coordinating sampling protocols and then combining results from separate areas around the lake, the group will be able to draw inferences about the mechanisms potentially contributing to year class strength in perch on a lake wide basis. Wisconsin Sea Grant funded two collaborative projects to work on yellow perch in Green Bay and in Lake Michigan. He has a unique time series of spawning and larval surveys conducted around Little Tail Point. Importantly, the perch population in Green Bay does not seem to be showing the same declines as that in Lake Michigan. Consequently, the Green Bay project provides an important comparison for results from Lake Michigan.