Michigan officials are moving to pull whitefish out of Lake Michigan and raise them in captivity, a last-ditch bid to preserve genetic bloodlines before invasive mussels finish wiping them out. State and tribal scientists plan to retrieve wild adult whitefish from several distinct populations, transferring survivors to hatcheries across the state in an effort that comes as commercial whitefish harvests have collapsed from 6.9 million pounds in 2009 to less than 2 million pounds in 2025.
The rescue is being led by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, focused on Lake Michigan populations that biologists say are running out of time, according to ClickOnDetroit. State and tribal scientists will collect spawning whitefish from Naubinway to Saugatuck this fall, part of an effort to capture as many of the Great Lakes' 18 unique whitefish populations in Lakes Michigan and Huron as possible before they disappear. Randy Claramunt said he fears the southern Lake Michigan whitefish stocks may already be too late to save, per the outlet's reporting.
Mussels Have Starved The Food Web
The root problem is invasive mussels, which now dominate the food web in every Great Lake except Lake Superior. Zebra and quagga mussels filter plankton out of the water so efficiently that baby whitefish are left without food, and the same mussel-filtered clarity leaves hatchlings vulnerable to deadly sunburn. Whitefish hatchlings have barely survived to adulthood in some areas of Lakes Michigan and Huron for two decades, and scientists say they have found no effective strategy to control mussels at the scale of an open lake basin.
Doug Craven said the rescue effort is fundamentally about saving genetic stocks before too few wild fish remain, and that whitefish losses point to broader ecosystem and fishery impacts from quagga mussels, the same report notes. Matt Herbert said scientists are examining every possible refuge for the fish — hatcheries, inland ponds, lakes and rivers — as state, federal, tribal and nonprofit researchers try to build out broader rescue options. Rescued whitefish could remain in human care for years or even decades until the mussel invasion subsides, and most whitefish populations are now considered imperiled.
A Shoestring Budget For A Long Mission
Money is tight. Michigan's state budget provided $350,000 for the whitefish rescue effort, and the Great Lakes Fishery Trust kicked in nearly $900,000 more, but current funding covers only a couple of years of hatchery space, fish food and other expenses for some populations. Scientists will incubate whitefish eggs at the Wolf Lake State Fish Hatchery in Van Buren County, the same facility where Michigan lawmakers designated $2 million in restricted Game and Fish Protection Account funds this year for a new coolwater production facility expected to exceed $10 million total, according to the Michigan House Fiscal Agency.
Dan Lord said the effort hopes to recruit neighboring states and the U.S. and Canadian governments as partners, since whitefish offspring could eventually help repopulate Lake Michigan once mussel control efforts reduce the invasion. That's a big if. Great Lakes lake trout recovery has taken decades and hundreds of millions of dollars, and mussel-control legislation in Congress has shown no sign of momentum despite the urgency biologists describe.
Congress Weighs A Half-Billion-Dollar Mussel Fight
U.S. Reps. Debbie Dingell and Tim Walberg have cosponsored legislation devoting $500 million to mussel-control research over the next decade. The bill, known as the Save the Great Lakes Fish Act, would direct the Great Lakes Fishery Commission to coordinate binational research into large-scale mussel control technologies, according to Rep. Debbie Dingell's office. In June, the Joint U.S.–Canadian Committee of Advisors to the Great Lakes Fishery Commission unanimously urged Congress to pass the bill, calling for a binational framework modeled on the region's sea lamprey control program, per the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.
The funding gap behind that push is stark. A Bridge Michigan analysis of federal spending records found that Great Lakes science programs have allocated an average of less than $1 million annually to invasive mussel research since 2010, compared with more than $20 million a year spent fighting sea lamprey and $90 million committed to Asian carp prevention barriers. Mussel-control efforts remain meagerly funded even as scientists describe mussel damage as one of the worst ecological threats in Great Lakes history. Separately, Walberg co-introduced the Aquatic Invasive Species Control and Prevention Act, which got a U.S. House subcommittee hearing in July and proposes $35 million annually in federal grants through 2031 for rapid response and technology development across U.S. waterways, according to The Sun Times News.
A Fleet And A Fishery Already Shrinking
The stakes reach beyond biology. Michigan issued 339 state commercial fishing licenses nearly a century ago, but that number had dropped to just 51 by 2019, with only 16 active businesses still operating, according to the Fishtown Preservation Society. Whitefish alone accounted for 91 percent of the total wholesale dockside value of Michigan's state-licensed commercial harvest in 2018, per a Mackinac Center for Public Policy analysis, meaning further population declines threaten the survival of the state's remaining commercial ports.
Commercial whitefish harvests in Lake Michigan averaged 7.5 million pounds annually in the late 1990s before main-basin recruitment collapsed as quagga mussel populations expanded in the mid-2000s, per the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. Green Bay now produces more commercial whitefish than Lake Michigan's entire main basin combined between 2019 and 2021. That collapse has fed a separate fight in Lansing, where Michigan state House lawmakers held hearings in May on legislation that would let commercial fishers harvest lake trout and walleye to offset whitefish declines — a proposal opposed by groups representing the state's 1.2 million licensed sport anglers, whose recreational fishery generates more than $2 billion in annual economic impact, according to Great Lakes Now.
A Tribal Precedent For Rearing Fish Inland
Amid the funding shortfalls, one Indigenous program offers a working model. The Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians' Natural Resources Division has developed pond-based whitefish rearing methods since 2020, releasing 278,819 pond-raised whitefish alongside 901,995 walleye into Upper Great Lakes waters this spring, according to Radio Results Network. Raising juvenile whitefish in protected inland ponds lets them bypass the plankton-depleted open lake waters that have proven so deadly during their earliest growth stages, a technique that could inform the broader rescue now underway.
For now, the mission remains a race against a clock nobody controls. Scientists can gather bloodlines and stock hatcheries, but the long-term survival of Great Lakes whitefish still depends on efforts to curb the mussel invasion — and that fight, unlike the fish capture set for this fall, has no clear timeline or funding secured.
