Thursday, February 28, 2002
By JON HAHN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST
You could call him Leroy Brown, meanest fish in the whole damn town.
Hangs out in Green Lake -- don't let your toy poodles go wading -- right in the middle of a polite Seattle neighborhood. Most folks rounding the lake or paddling around on it don't have an inkling that a natural killer is lurking there.
Some calls him Tiger Muskie. And inch for inch, pound for pound, he's the leanest, meanest eating machine this side of Amityville. Tigers are half-breeds, a hybrid cross of a true muskellunge and its cousin, northern pike. Tiger muskies can't reproduce -- maybe that's what makes 'em so mean -- but they're a great sport fish. Not bad eating, either.
Most are produced in fish hatcheries, but the muskie-pike cross occurs naturally. The national record tiger was caught in 1919 on the Michigan-Wisconsin border (Lac Vieux-Desert in Michigan) and measured 54 inches long, more than 26 inches around and weighed 51 pounds.
The toothy tiger I saw earlier this week was only about 15 inches long when he and 150 others were planted in Green Lake a little over one year ago. Now he's 32 inches and weighs a tad over 9 pounds, and we know he didn't grow that fast by slipping across Aurora Avenue North for one of those 12-egg omelets at Beth's Cafe.
When 255-acre Green Lake became clogged with common carp and undersize panfish, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife planted about 150 tigers in the lake in the fall of 2000 to see if they'd do there what they've done with great success at Mayfield Lake down in Lewis County.
Tiger muskies have been planted there for several years to control carp, pike minnow (formerly called squawfish) and other undesirables. Since then, the state record for tiger muskies continues to grow as they get fat doing what they're s'posed to do, and the record now is 31 1/4 pounds, caught last fall by John V. Bays.
When tigers get that big -- they reach maturity in about four or five years -- they will take out the fattest and easiest victims, especially carp, according to Bruce Bolding, fish biologist in the state's Inland Fish Research Program.
"We go out on Green Lake at night, about once a month, to catch tigers and pump their stomachs to see what, and how much they're eating," Bolding said.
And just before I watched him and Chad Jackson, the local inland fish biologist, pump "Leroy Brown's" stomach, Bolding noted: "With walleye (pike) and certainly tiger muskies, you want to keep your fingers out of their mouths!"
That's why muskie fishermen use wire leaders: the business end of a tiger muskie looks as if it could open a locked Toyota.
Ain't no telling just how many carp and pike minnow and undersize panfish are clogging Green Lake, but that tiger lost a lotta sushi when they irrigated his stomach with pressurized water from a garden sprayer with a small tube attached.
"We can tell by certain readily identifiable bones what kind of prey they've eaten," Bolding said as he labeled and sealed a specimen jar with some of the tiger's stomach contents.
Catching tigers and their cousins, the regular muskellunge, is usually a long, patient and physical process of casting large artificial lures or flashy bucktail spinners and hoping to lure them from the underwater weeds where they lie in wait for passing meals.
Bolding loves to fish, but he doesn't have time to catch tigers one at a time. And for research here, as well as at other lakes, the state biologists use specially built, 16-foot, aluminum, flat-bottom boats with electrical-shocking outriggers.
The dangled anodes, linked to an onboard generator, zap about 3 amperes of juice into a 6- to 10-foot sphere ahead of the slow-moving boat. Done after dark, when the tiger muskies are more prone to move out of their weed-bed lairs, the shocking is specifically gauged so as not to injure the fish.
"They're only stunned momentarily," Bolding noted, "That's why we need people with long-handled nets on the bow, to get them into the boat as fast as possible. Most people think they just float to the surface, but they pretty much remain wherever they were in the water column, and they're not always easy to see, especially in lakes like this where turbidity and algae hampers visibility."
Jackson and UW fisheries graduate student Bridget Smith manned the long-handled nets on the bow while Bolding guided the boat.
After some initial difficulty with the onboard generator, we putted slowly away from the lake's aquatic center dock and glided beneath an almost-full moon, about 50 feet parallel to the shore.
Less than 10 minutes out, Jackson yelled: "We got one!" and brought up a net that barely contained the first of 11 tiger muskies pulled in that night.
After measuring and weighing -- 32 inches long, 9.28 pounds -- the fish was dipped in a bucket of anesthetic solution to dull its senses, then Bolding very cautiously inserted the stomach tube. Only some of the fish caught had readily identifiable stomach contents, indicating the tigers were perhaps not eating as voraciously as usual because of the 40-degree water temperature. The shocked fish are kept onboard in a live tank until they've revived; then they're carefully returned to the lake.
Bolding and Jackson also set trap nets and a 150-foot variable-mesh gillnet as part of the research effort, but tiger muskies seem very good at avoiding nets, Bolding said.
"We plan to restock Green Lake with more tiger muskies this year, to supplement whatever number may have died, been eaten by other fish, or maybe even taken by fishermen," he said. There have been occasional reports of tiger muskies taken on line there, but perhaps you'd better wait till this summer, when there might be some legal 36-inchers.
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Can ya imagine how nervous the ducks in the lake will be swimming with hungry tiger-muskies in the lake come spring and summer when their feeding more actively?
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