“Largemouth bass were a fairly important diet item for them as well,” Glade said. The preliminary numbers on Lake Miltona showed that yellow perch made up the largest percentage of the muskie’s diet by numbers. He’s able to take a little chunk of flesh from a diet and he can do genetic barcoding on that chunk of flesh and tell us what species it was.” Loren Miller from the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota DNR. “Some of those you can identify the species based on the bone structure,” Glade said. The contents ranged from easily identifiable species that had just been eaten, down to matter that was nothing more than bones or a small piece of tissue.
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“Overall, we had a 67% full stomach rate on muskies throughout all seasons, which is actually quite a bit better than most of the other studies that I’ve seen,” Glade said.įrom Miltona, 29 muskies were sampled with full stomachs in the spring, compared to two in the summer and 15 in the fall. Some fish sampled had nothing in their stomachs due to not feeding recently. Water is then slowly pumped in before pressure builds enough to cause the fish to regurgitate any stomach contents. Researchers also looked at the diets of fish on Miltona by going along with crews from the Glenwood Area Fisheries department during netting surveys in 2019.ĭiet samples are taken from muskies by placing a small piece of clear tubing through the fish’s mouth and into the back of its stomach. Most of the muskies that are sampled are captured through electrofishing at night. Glade has not analyzed all the numbers from every lake that was sampled in 2019 due to the study being ongoing, but he has taken a hard look at the data from Lake Miltona. The work is scheduled to be completed in the fall of 2021 with final publication of the results following that. The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to stop spring sampling in 2020, but Glade said they are hopeful that sampling not done this year could be rescheduled to 2021. “Then we have (four) reference lakes too to see if there’s any kind of significant difference in walleye, pike and largemouth bass diets in lakes that do or don’t have muskies in them.”
“We’re taking diets from muskies, northern pike, walleye and largemouth bass in all the lakes so that we’re able to compare diets between lakes and between seasons,” Glade said. Seven of those lakes hold muskies, but northern pike, largemouth bass and walleyes are also a part of the study that is designed to do a wide-ranging diet overview of some of the state’s most popular predatory fish and see how the species are co-existing in Minnesota waters. The work is scheduled to look at 11 bodies of water in Minnesota. The Minnesota DNR and Bemidji State University have a contract to complete the project, with Brian Herwig of the Bemidji DNR office and Jeff Reed of the Glenwood office leading the overall research. Kamden Glade is a 25-year-old graduate student at Bemidji State University who is in charge of gathering most of the diet data. The call for more modern diet studies on muskies is being answered, and Lake Miltona in Douglas County is part of a project that will take a close look at the big game fish’s primary prey in some Minnesota lakes.
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