Muskie Resolutions for 2025
The dawn of a new year is often the time that people make resolutions to improve their health, develop better habits, or grow their relationships with loved ones. The muskie-fishing public tends to use this time of year to set goals for the upcoming season. I’ll admit to being a little different from most, however. This is the time of year that I look forward to learning new things about muskies and muskie angling, and I usually take a hard look at the things I’m curious about to set an agenda for myself. Living in the northern tier of the muskie range I have a lot of down time, angling-wise, from January through May, and I like to use this time productively. So without further ado, here are the top five things I’m hoping to learn about muskies in 2025…
Muskie Color Vision
A number of years back, I was chatting with a fisheries biologist at a muskie expo, and he mentioned that there was some informal work done on muskie color vision. Specifically, he had heard about dissections being done on muskie eyes that had been recovered by taxidermists back when skin mounts were still popular. These dissections had revealed information about the photoreceptors in muskie eyes and their color sensitivity. While human color vision involves photoreceptors that are sensitive to three color bands (red, green, and blue), muskie color vision was said to involve photoreceptors that are sensitive to only two color bands. This means that muskie color vision is likely going to be quite different from human color vision. I’m hoping to learn more about this two-color system so that I can infer a bit more about muskie color vision. For instance, we humans perceive an object as white if it has equal amounts of red, green, and blue entering our eyes. But equal amounts of red, green, and blue wavelengths might not cause an equivalent color representation in a muskie’s visual scheme. So what we see as white, a muskie may see as a very different color depending on the sensitivity curves in those two color bands. I can’t wait to dig into this information more deeply if I can!
Forage Habits
In order to hunt the freshwater apex predator, we need to know at least a bit about the nature of their prey. So what do muskies eat? Luckily, we have very recent scientific research on the subject. Shout out to Kamden Glade, formerly a Bemidi State biology graduate student and now a fisheries specialist for the MN DNR! He was lucky enough to pump the stomachs of largemouth bass, walleyes, northern pike, and muskies and look through the goop (a technical term!) to see what these fish were eating. One of the main reasons to do this research was to see if there was any validity to the complaints that Minnesota lake associations were making about how muskies were eating all their walleyes (the cornerstone of the “stop stocking muskies!” movement from about five years ago in Minnesota). Well, this work was able to show that walleyes eat more walleyes than muskies do. What is more, muskies have the most diverse diet of any of the predators that were studied. This isn’t terribly surprising since muskies are the largest of these predators, so more types of prey items were available for them to consume. So what do muskies eat? In no particular order… bugs, worms, perch, crappies, bluegills, crayfish, bullheads, frogs, ciscoes, suckers, birds (not just baby ducks, but a full-grown coot!), muskrats, redhorse and the list goes on. Walleyes DO show up on this list eventually but, sadly, bats did not show up (sorry Savage Gear 3D Bat!).
I think this huge variety in prey makes muskies hard to pattern. Some times of year, muskies might be targeting bluegills, while other times of the year they may prefer bullheads. When do they target which and why? To know the answer to that question, you almost certainly need to know something about the habits of those forage fish. I’m sure there are many of you reading this that are expert crappie or walleye anglers. You have a leg up on me in that regard. You probably already know all about the seasonal and daily movements of these muskie prey species, but I still feel I have a lot to learn. Should I be bottom ticking at night when the bullheads are active, and muskies are on the prowl for delicious whiskered treats? How can I locate schools of crappie over open water in the middle of summer? How often do the bluegills spawn in my local waters? Should I be looking for marauding muskies chasing bedding bluegills in July? And when does that magical muskrat pattern start so I know when to break out my over-sized topwater baits? There’s so much to know, and I’m going to love diving into these details over the coming months.
Muskie Mortality
On average, what is the rate of post-release mortality for muskies? This is actually a difficult number to figure out. In the early 1980’s, a scientific study on muskie mortality concluded that about 30% of muskies died in response to being caught. In the early 2010’s, a new study with way more muskies caught was conducted in which 0% of muskies died after being caught. Of course, the release practices of the 2010’s were probably significantly more fish-friendly compared to the practices of the early 1980’s. Yet it is safe to say that the post-release mortality rate isn’t really 0%. So what is a good average? 5%? 10%? 3%? I know that a rule of thumb used by the Minnesota DNR in the past for post-release mortality in walleyes is 50%. While we might think of muskies as being very delicate, it seems they are a lot more robust than walleyes. Of course, there’s no reason to treat muskies as anything but delicate during release: be nice to them, even the small ones are our future!
The reason I think this is important is because as muskie angling success rates go up, we have the potential to do damage to our fisheries. Let’s say that you’re a muskie pro, and you caught and released 100 muskies last year. Since you’re a pro, your handling techniques are awesome which means your post-release mortality rate is only 3%. The brutal math says you’ve likely killed 3 muskies out of the 100 you caught, even if just through bad luck. Compare that to a newbie muskie angler that catches 2 fish all year. Even if their inexperienced handling techniques would result in a post-release mortality rate of 10% (more than 3 times worse than yours), they likely haven’t even accidentally killed 1 muskie out of the 2 they caught. Who is doing more damage to the fishery through angling?
As our collective muskie angling skill grows, we have an obligation to grow our handling skills as well. I know there are a lot of people saying that muskie angling is becoming too easy for some people, but I think the point of this sport is the maximum amount of enjoyment for the maximum number of people (next decade’s anglers included!). We’re all partners in this, so quality release skills need to be emphasized.
An important reason to learn the post-release mortality rate is so that our fisheries managers (DNR, etc…) can make better decisions for maintaining sustainable muskie stocking practices. Lakes that are now sustained solely through natural reproduction might not be able to continue under increased levels of angling success; they may need supplementary stocking. Lakes that are maintained through stocking alone may need to have new stocking strategies employed. And to know how best to manage, they’ll need to know how angling is affecting the population.
Muskie Migrations
I heard an anecdote from a fisheries specialist at the Minnesota DNR this year that really sparked my interest in muskie migration. He was conducting a routine population study in a water body that historically did not have muskies in it when he captured a nice muskie of about 40 inches. He was going to put a PIT tag in the fish (sort of like when you put a chip in your pet in case they run away), but protocol dictates that he check to see if the fish already had a PIT tag in it. To his astonishment, it did! When he checked the PIT tag number, it came up that the fish had been stocked in a large muskie lake. The only connection between that muskie lake and where he found this muskie was a tiny stream. The fish traveled 23 miles down this creek, under interstate highways, through two other lakes, over a 50-foot waterfall, and along a 2-mile section of creek less than 1 foot deep to arrive at its new home. In places like Minnesota where most lakes are NOT muskie lakes but where small streams flow out of and into other lakes, where are there muskies where there really SHOULDN’T be muskies?
There are a number of radio telemetry studies on muskies that have been used to show how muskies migrate into and through large flowage and river systems. I’d love to know more about how and when muskies get the itch to travel far away from the places where they’ve been established. I’ve read part of one study that showed that muskies tend to roam all throughout a multi-basin lake/flowage, whereas walleyes tend to remain within one basin in that same system. I’m curious if muskies are driven by the need to find the next awesome spawning site, or they are searching for more and better forage, or whether they are just rebellious fish that can’t stick around in one place too long. Whatever the answer, such studies might lead me to find new muskie waters that shouldn’t BE muskie waters. If that means I can fish places where I don’t have to share my spots with quite so many fellow muskie anglers, I wouldn’t be too sad.
Muskie Coloration
If you’ve watched any number of muskie videos, you’ve probably noticed how the coloration of muskies is different from place to place. In stained Wisconsin lakes, I tend to see dark green, sometimes almost black, coloration for muskies. Here in Minnesota, I’ve noticed significant color differences for muskies even in the same body of water! Fish caught in the shallow weeds tend to be dark, while fish caught in open water tend to be much more lightly colored (we Minnesotans call them “blondies”). Just a couple weeks ago, I heard a fisheries biologist talk about doing a demonstration for school children using a largemouth bass. He brought two tanks for the bass to swim in, one with a dark bottom and one with a light bottom. After moving the bass from the dark tank to the light tank, he would talk for a while and then move the fish back to the dark tank. At that point, the fish had lightened up significantly and was easily visible against the dark background. I didn’t know that fish were chameleons to that extent! I thought the change in coloration was more due to differences in genetics or in diet.
I would love to know more about this since it can help (at least a little bit) with patterning. When I see blonde fish in shallow, is this an indication of significant migration from open water? Also, as I scientist, I’d just like to know how and why muskies engage in this color-changing behavior.
I hope my interest in some of these subjects has piqued your own curiosity. You never know how that curiosity might benefit your catch rates, so follow those crazy ideas down the rabbit hole. See where they lead you.
Best of luck on the water!
Dr. Bob
