Any doubts Howard Tanner had about whether a hatchery-raised crop of Pacific salmon could find a home in the freshwater of the Great Lakes evaporated just months after the first class of finger-sized cohos were planted in Lake Michigan. 

The fish began their lives in a Michigan hatchery in the winter of 1965 and were raised by human hands until their release in April 1966.  Pacific coho typically have a three-year life cycle — spending the first year and a half in the rivers and streams in which they hatch before descending to the ocean for about 18 months and then returning to those native streams in fall of their third year to spawn and die. 

A Watershed Moment Second of three parts

Published Dec. 7, 2014 Sunday : The man with the salmon plan

: The man with the salmon plan Monday : Salmon crowned king, but its reign is wobbly

: Tuesday: A Great Lake revival Previous installments

This meant the first cohos Tanner planted should spend the summers of 1966 and 1967 in the lake before, hopefully, following their exquisite sense of smell back to the waters in which they were released. 

The plan was to capture some of those fish upon their return and use the eggs and sperm to continue the hatchery program.  But not all Pacific salmon follow this three-year plan in their native saltwater.  Sometimes a handful of cohos, if conditions are right, will get big enough to sexually mature and return to spawn after just one summer in open water. 

This is exactly what happened on Lake Michigan in fall 1966.  Fishermen pulled hundreds of coho from waters near where they had been planted just several months earlier.  Some were already a whopping 7 pounds, approaching full size for an adult coho in its native Pacific waters.  More remarkably, in the ocean these early returners, referred to as "jacks," are almost always males. 

But Michigan's first jack class included females — a further sign that Lake Michigan was ample salmon habitat indeed. 

To celebrate the budding salmon makeover of the Great Lakes, Michigan fishery officials decided to hold a banquet at Cobo Hall in Detroit — "the largest meeting place we could think of," the late Wayne Tody, the man who replaced Tanner as chief of Michigan's fish division, wrote in a 2003 self-published history of Michigan's fishery. 

Tody offered fishery officials from Oregon and Washington an all-expense paid trip to the Great Lakes to thank them for helping to launch what was perhaps the most ambitious fish-stocking program the world had ever known.  The Pacific Northwest delegation arrived in Houghton near the northern tip of the Upper Peninsula in September 1966. 

The group spent the next three days on an aerial tour of the upper Great Lakes, flying first to the eastern end of Lake Superior then down the western Michigan coast, over to Chicago and then back north, over the Straits of Mackinac and down the eastern Michigan coast of Lake Huron to Lake Erie.  The Washington state chief of fisheries was flabbergasted by the scope of what he'd only known as blue blobs on a map, remarking that "never had he imagined that much water could exist outside the ocean," Tody wrote. 

Tanner, who had assumed a professorship at Michigan State University but participated in the festivities, remembers the Westerners' optimism after learning about the huge number of full-grown coho jacks that had returned just months after they were planted. 

The visiting officials told them this jack run was nothing compared to what they should expect the next year, when the majority of the nearly 1 million planted coho were expected to return to the waters in which they were released. 

"This is going to be big," they told him. " It's going to be big." 

Coho fever

The fall 1967 coho run on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan was quickly dubbed "coho fever." 

Tanner said it's hard to understand the excitement of tens of thousands of fish returning to the waters where they had been stocked.  Some coho were coming in fat like footballs, approaching 20 pounds. 

It was as if all the skiers in Michigan awoke one morning to find that their little hills had been replaced by the Rocky Mountains. 

"Try to imagine a population of avid fishermen ... they might have dreamed of going salmon fishing to the West Coast and spending a lot of money.  Or maybe go to Alaska or something like that but very few of them would ever do that," said Tanner. 

"And suddenly with existing tackle and small boats and motors, they went out and they caught their load of five fish, and their lines got busted, and the fish were leaping out of the water, and they were all around them and the excitement was just explosive. 

"It was a frenzy." 

Anglers head out to fish for salmon near the mouth of the Platte River in Michigan in the fall of 1967.  The coho run on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan that year was quickly dubbed “coho fever.” 

Traffic jams at the boat ramps stretched nearly two miles.  Many fisherman who had traveled hundreds of miles motored out with neither the gear nor experience to safely navigate big waters.  A gale blew in on Sept. 23 and estimates at the time were that some 150 fishermen had to be plucked from the water, many by Coast Guard helicopter. 

Seven drowned, but the tragedy did nothing to temper the fever.  It only prompted further investments in bigger boats and engines that spawned the need for more ramps and marinas — the exact coastal economic boom Tanner had hoped for. 

Chinook Salmon Mark Hoffman History

Also known as “king salmon,” chinook were brought from the Pacific Ocean to help eliminate invasive alewives and create a recreational fishery.  Mass stocking of chinook started in 1967, one year after the first coho stocking.  Diet

In the Great Lakes, smelt and alewives make up their main diet.  Management

Stocking has been cut dramatically on Lake Michigan due to the decline in the alewife population.  In Lake Huron, chinook are no longer the dominant predator, due to the collapse of the alewife population. 

Tody, meanwhile, had expanded the stocking program to include chinook salmon, similar to coho but substantially bigger.  Chinook, also known as "kings," can grow to more than 100 pounds in their native Pacific waters.  Coho, by comparison, typically grow to less than 10 pounds in the ocean, and top out around 35 pounds. 

But chinook aren't just bigger.  They are much cheaper to raise because they can be hatched, reared and planted in six months rather than the 18 months it typically takes to launch a class of coho.  So by fall 1967, Lake Michigan was bursting with nearly 2 million planted coho, 1 million chinook and about 1 million native lake trout, which were planted by the federal government. 

It wasn't long before the other Great Lakes states followed Michigan in developing their own salmon stocking programs.  The Great Lakes have been known as a world-class salmon fishery ever since. 

The audacity of such a huge ecological transformation triggered by Tanner and Tody leaves the biologists of today in awe. 

"They were real cowboy," said University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee biologist John Janssen, noting it was an enlightened decision at the time, given the understanding of how the Great Lakes' food web worked and the severity of the alewife infestation. 

"They had nothing to lose.  The lakes were so destroyed there was no place to go but up," said Michigan Department of Natural Resources biologist Dave Fielder. 

"It was a creative, clever, smart shot from the hip, because they didn't know what was going to happen," added Fielder. " But boy, did it sure work out." 

Nearly 50 years later, Tanner takes particular pride in the idea that he did more than control an alewife population.  He took an ecological wasteland and built from it a sport fishery like none other, one that he says benefited more than boat builders, charter operators and the economies of coastal communities. 

After the salmon arrived, he notes, the public demanded action to make sure the fish they caught were safe to eat.  The Great Lakes at the time had been ravaged by more than a century of toxic insults that were still growing annually before the salmon arrived.  Tanner cites the salmon as a big reason people demanded action on reducing those pollutants. 

While salmon consumption limits continue to this day for PCBs and other contaminants, Great Lakes waters are by most measures far cleaner in terms of industrial pollutants than when Tanner arrived on the job in the mid-1960s. 

"I always point out that we created a constituency for the lakes," said Tanner, who was named Conservationist of the Year in 1968 by the National Wildlife Federation. 

"There was an awakening." 

A pest with benefits

Tanner dismisses a widely held perception that salmon were primarily brought in to control alewives. 

"We were fisheries biologists," he said in an interview. " We were not there to solve a beach problem.  We were there to build a fishery." 

He likened his approach to that of a rancher who stumbles upon an island the size of Lake Michigan that is overgrown with grass. 

"Do you think he'd say, 'I could put some cows on that island and shorten that grass?'"  he asked. " That is not what he's going to say.  He's going to say, 'My God, I can raise more beef than you ever saw in your life.'" 

And just like a rancher trying to raise every ounce of beef from a pasture, biologists boosted annual hatchery plantings on Lakes Michigan and Huron in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Slashing salmon plantings To prevent a salmon collapse on Lake Michigan similar to what happened a decade ago on Lake Huron, fishery managers have cut the annual chinook stocking numbers in half in recent years to 1.7 million – less than a quarter of the peak in the 1980s.  Cutting the stocking number is meant to keep the fish from consuming the lake's struggling alewife population.  U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

Stockings on Lake Michigan peaked in the 1980s with annual plantings of more than 19 million salmon and trout, including nearly 8 million chinook.  It was an angler playground.  Surveys at the time showed even a boat loaded with inexperienced fishermen could reel in chinook, many weighing 20 pounds or more, at a rate of about one every couple of hours. 

And then came the crash. 

It turned out, like cows overgrazing a pasture, there was a limit to the number of salmon the lakes could sustain.  Rotting chinook started washing ashore in Lake Michigan in the late 1980s, dead from a bacterial kidney disease induced by a decline in alewives.  The chinook catch rate in the early 1990s plunged to just 15% of what it was in the mid-'80s. 

The salmon famine instantly changed the image of the alewives.  No longer were they viewed as a pest.  They had morphed into treasured forage fish that were the backbone of the Great Lakes' world-class recreational fishery. 

Janssen, the UWM biologist, remembers the shift happening even in the scientific community. 

"You could see it in the research grant proposals in the mid-1980s," he said. " Before that, the proposals were framed as 'Alewife the Nuisance Species.'  After that, it was 'Alewife the Resource.'" 

You also could see it in the priorities of environmental groups whose mission is to protect the ecological health of the lakes.  The National Wildlife Federation was among a group that sued a Michigan power company for its fish-killing water intakes on Lake Michigan, citing the toll they were taking on several species, including alewives and smelt, another nonnative forage fish. 

The lawsuit led to a settlement that created the Great Lakes Fishery Trust that has in the last two decades produced tens of millions of dollars to fund programs that include academic and government fisheries research on the Great Lakes. 

The alewives' makeover was made complete in 1991, when the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources adopted an order to ban commercial trawling for alewives on Lake Michigan.  The fish were being sold as fertilizer and cat food for a penny or two per pound. 

"The health of the Lake Michigan salmon sport fishery has been strongly dependent on abundant alewife populations," read the March 18, 1991, emergency resolution. " Alewives constitute the primary diet of salmon stocks in Lake Michigan.  As alewife stocks declined during the 1980s, salmon health also declined." 

Citing recent research at the time, the resolution's authors concluded, "alewives need protection to recover from precariously low levels." 

The protection order worked as expected; alewife numbers rebounded.  But numbers of native perch, which had been recovering with the alewives' demise, crashed.  Commercial fishing for Lake Michigan perch in Wisconsin was banned in the mid-1990s to try to resuscitate that species.  It has never recovered. 

The chinook catch rate eventually climbed back to pre-crash levels. 

Humans appeared to be back in control — for the moment. 

Lesson in humility

Salmon collapse hit Lake Huron hard and fast Lake Huron's alewives all but disappeared a decade ago due to a combination of too many salmon feasting upon them and competition with zebra and quagga mussels.  Chinook are highly dependent on alewives, and their numbers collapsed soon after.  Source: Michigan Department of Natural Resources

Lake Huron was not hit as hard as Lake Michigan in the salmon crash of the late 1980s and early 1990s.  But a decade later, it suffered its own devastating chinook demise.  And this one looks to be permanent. 

It has become clearer with each passing year that the salmon-fueled carnival atmosphere in Lake Huron's coastal towns a quarter century ago was but a biological flicker — the brief few decades when humans pulled the levers on the ecological balance of a Great Lake and were able to convert an infestation of trash fish into one of the planet's pre-eminent salmon fisheries. 

The crash happened in part because the salmon began breeding in the wild at unsustainable numbers — there were simply too many chinook mouths and not enough alewife tails. 

Tanner and his colleagues always knew Pacific salmon might figure out how to reproduce in Great Lakes tributaries, most likely in the cold, clear streams of Canada.  And in the first decades of the stocking program it was known that some salmon had done just that.  But nobody knew to what extent. 

Biologists can tell which fish are stocked and which are "wild" because they clip a fin on each hatchery-raised fish, or mark it in some other manner.  They can then estimate how many wild fish are swimming in a lake by comparing the number of fish caught from the hatchery population to the number of wild fish caught. 

By the time they started doing this ciphering in 2000, they were stunned.  They had figured natural reproduction accounted for maybe 15% of Lake Huron's chinook population but learned that, in addition to the 3.5 million hatchery chinook planted annually, nature was churning out as many as 16 million more.  In other words, they had their estimates almost completely backward — only about 20% of the lake's chinook population was hatchery raised. 

Like pilots suddenly realizing their aircraft is loaded with more cargo than physics will allow to stay aloft, fishery managers slashed their chinook plantings. 

It was too late. 

The finely calibrated salmon machine the biologists thought they had built had gone wild. 

It turned out the alewives were not only being decimated by far more salmon in the lake than anyone realized.  They also were struggling due to an infestation of zebra and quagga mussels.  There are now trillions of the penny-sized mussels smothering the lake bottom, each of which can filter up to a liter of water per day, stripping away the nutrients that alewives depend on. 

It was another one-two punch; the alewives were both starving and being devoured. 

The alewife crash started around 2003, but few noticed it at first.  The salmon fishing had been as good as ever — record catch rates were recorded just the year before.  But it turned out this was not the sign of a healthy salmon fishery.  It was a sign the salmon were running out of alewives to eat. 

"The fish were feeding more aggressively to compensate for the low prey supply," said Jim Johnson, a retired biologist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. 

Biologists doing netting surveys found empty chinook stomachs only occasionally in 2003, but in 2004 it was common.  By 2005, the chinook catch from key ports on Lake Huron had plummeted from over 104,000 just three years earlier to 11,700.  By 2010, the harvest crashed to barely 3,000, and it has since shown little sign of rebounding. 


Few biologists today fault Tanner and Tody for so audaciously reconstituting the Great Lakes — Michigan's new research vessel for Lake Huron will bear Tanner's name. 

But the lesson many of today's biologists have taken from what happened on Lake Huron is one of humility. 

"As humans, we always want to be in control, but we can't control the Great Lakes," said John Dettmers, a biologist with the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. " We changed it, but we didn't necessarily control it." 

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