Michigan DNR to track fish stocking using 23andMe-style gene testing

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources has actually started utilizing hereditary screening to track the success of a few of its fish-stocking operations.

The objective is to discover if fish living in a specific water body came down from the moms and dads of equipped fish. Doing so assists the DNR understand if its multimillion-dollar equipping efforts are settling by informing them if the equipped fish are residing on in the waterway.

“Think about genes (screening) like Ancestry.com, 23andMe,” Jen Johnson, senior fisheries management biologist for the DNR, informed the Michigan Natural Resources Commission throughout its conference Wednesday in Marquette. “Are you related? That’s the huge concern that we’re asking here.”

The DNR invests about a 3rd of its yearly spending plan on fish rearing and equipping. In the 2024-25 , that amounted to over $11 million. According to the department, previous approaches of tracking success have actually been restricted or pricey.

Pilot research study with the brand-new approach, called parentage-based tracking, has actually been cost-efficient, maximized personnel time, and has actually revealed some illuminating outcomes.

“This tool is going to open a great deal of insights into what we do at the fish department,” stated Randy Claramunt, fisheries chief for the DNR.

It will permit the department to evaluate whether fish they capture were born naturally or from fish reproduced and equipped by the DNR, which will provide a sense of which method is working much better.

The DNR types and stocks fish mostly to develop brand-new locations for individuals to fish a specific types or to include numbers to having a hard time populations. The department can inspect to see if equipped fish are enduring in their presented area by tagging the fish and after that looking for them there at a later date.

Tagging approaches have actually been troublesome. Utilizing physical tags has actually implied separately tagging fish. Tags can get lost or an angler might stop working to report when they attract a tagged fish.

Another technique of tagging includes internally marking fish, however that technique can just be confirmed on dead fish utilizing a microscopic lense, and it uses up a great deal of personnel time. It’s likewise more pricey than hereditary screening.

Parentage-based tagging includes genetically evaluating the DNA of the moms and dads of a brood of equipped fish. Scientist gather the moms and dads’ DNA given that their offspring are vulnerable when young. Doing so can likewise assist them figure out the qualities of the most effective moms and dads.

Later on, when fish are captured in a location where equipping took place, their DNA is sent out to a laboratory at Michigan State University to discover if they were associated with the moms and dads of the equipped fish.

“It’s a truly cool strategy. Before we really executed this statewide, it was a smart concept to begin a smaller sized pilot task to see if this is a real reliable strategy,” Johnson stated.

She chose to utilize parentage-based tagging to examine the success of the DNR’s walleye equipping approaches in Dickinson and Iron counties in the Upper Peninsula.

In between 2024 and 2025, Johnson’s group gathered fish from some waterbodies there and the outcomes were quite illuminating.

Out of 25 fish captured in Lake Emily, 24 were discovered to be associated with the equipped fish household. Equipping was working there.

The reverse was discovered in 2 other lakes. Out of 147 fish captured in Hargerman Lake, just 2 were associated with the equipped fish. Out of 34 fish captured in Lake Ottawa, once again simply 2 were connected to the equipped fish.

Utilizing additional hereditary analysis, Johnson figured out that the walleye in Hagerman Lake were not related at all to the walleye discovered in Little Bay de Noc, which is where they had actually been getting the moms and dads for current walleye equipping recreation efforts.

They discovered that the walleye in Hagerman Lake were genetically identical from walleye discovered in Lake Gogebic, where the moms and dads for fish equipping efforts of the 1980s were taken from. Efforts from that years achieved success, while the current efforts in the lake were not.

“Stocking’s a costly venture, and irritatingly, we’re attempting to do equipping efforts that were mainly inefficient,” Natural Resources Commissioner Brandon Fewens stated.

“If I had my method, all 20 million fish we equipped would be tagged, so we might assess them,” reacted Claramunt, the fisheries chief.

For this upcoming , the DNR will take 500 samples of equipped walleye from waterbodies throughout the state to have them genetically evaluated. Johnson stated this “is going to assist allow biologists with their equipping choices.” They will not continue to equip Hagerman Lake.

Broadening the program to other types in the future would “eventually assist us address a great deal of these management concerns we have.”

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This story was initially released by Bridge Michigan and dispersed through a collaboration with The Associated Press.