Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Wisconsin Fishery
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

Wisconsin Fishery Project


Statewide evaluation of calcified structures used to estimate ages of northern pike

July 2012 - June 2017


Personnel

Participating Agencies

  • Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

This project is a continuation of the Wisconsin DNR Fish Age Task Group’s efforts to develop statewide protocols for estimating the age of species of management interest and is similar to the efforts we have completed for bluegills and walleyes. Our objective is to provide guidance to biologists regarding selection and preparation of calcified structures. At this point we have processed and aged scales from more than 200 largemouth bass collected from 7 lakes statewide. We are currently processing northern pike collected during spring 2015. Our initial results suggest that dorsal spines are more effective for replicating otolith ages than scales, if a correction factor is employed.