Walleye

On the opening day of Minnesota’s fishing season in 1965, the Minnesota Legislature selected walleye as the state’s official fish. While walleyes are neither the state’s biggest fish nor its most abundant, they are consistently ranked as Minnesotans’ favorite. 

Walleyes are the largest members of the Perch (Percidae) family. They are typically brownish yellow or olive green in color, with a white belly and two transparent dorsal fins. The tail bears a distinctive white smudge on its lower edge. A walleye’s most noticeable feature, however, is its eyes. Like cats, skunks, raccoons, and deer, walleyes have a reflective layer of tissue behind their retinas, known as the tapetum lucidum (bright tapestry) that helps them see well in the dark.

The fish are known by many names, including walleyed pike, yellow pike, yellow pikeperch, and yellow pickerel. Their Dakota names include hoištázi (yellow-eyed fish), hopháthankáda (big-headed fish), and howakaŋ (sacred fish). Their Ojibwe name is ogaa, and their scientific name is Sander vitreus. “Vitreus,” Latin for “glassy,” is another a reference to the fish’s eyes. “Sander,” the German word for walleye, represents the theory that walleyes originated in Europe and reached North America by crossing the Bering Isthmus during the Pliocene Epoch. The ancestors of today’s walleyes are believed to have dispersed throughout much of North America after passing through the Rocky Mountains to the Great Lakes and Mississippi River Basins.

In the 1600s, when Ojibwe and other Anishinaabe people arrived in the Upper Midwest, they found an abundance of walleyes in the area’s lakes and rivers––enough to sustain themselves year round. They regarded walleyes as a sacred gift from Gitchi Manitou, the Creator, and believed that the fish, with their glow-in-the-dark eyes, symbolized knowledge, illumination, and guidance.

White settlers arriving from Europe in the 1800s relied on fishing as a primary food source during their first years in Minnesota. During World War I and World War II as well as the Great Depression, fishing provided sustenance for low-income Minnesotans. After opening in 1917, the Red Lake Nation Fishery (the first commercial walleye fishery of its kind in the US) supplied food to soldiers as well as the home front, and by 1929 the business was fully operated by the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians on the Red Lake Indian Reservation.

In the post-war economic recovery of the 1950s and 60s, anglers became less interested in fishing for subsistence and more interested in sport fishing, competing to see who could land the biggest fish, the most fish, the wildest fish. Walleyes were an ideal sport-fishing target due to their large size and their abundance in Minnesota. On average, a walleye caught in Minnesota is about three to six years old, weighing in at a little over one pound and measuring between twelve and twenty inches. Left to mature, male walleyes can live fifteen to twenty years, approaching a trophy-sized weight of nearly ten pounds and thirty inches in length. Female walleyes are larger and live longer, potentially reaching forty inches at twenty-five years.

Fishing for walleyes is often described as a challenging puzzle, requiring different combinations of bait and tackle, depending on the weather, depth of water, time of year, and time of day. The fish tend to feed at dawn and dusk, when they can see their prey in the low light of their tapetum lucidum, but their prey can’t see them. When hooked, they dive fast and deep, and they’re fierce fighters with sharp teeth.

Most walleyes served in Minnesota pubs, restaurants, and fairground booths are caught and processed in Canada. With the exception of Red Lake Nation Fishery, commercial fishing for walleyes is largely restricted in Minnesota in order to protect walleye populations, honor treaties, and support recreational fishing.

In 1996, biologists studying walleyes in Red Lake found that the population had collapsed after years of overfishing. Knowing that the lake needed time to recover, a Red Lake’s fishermen’s cooperative voted to suspend all commercial gillnet fishing for the season. A year later the Red Lake Tribal Council halted hook-and-line fishing, and in 1999 it banned all fishing on Red Lake. With fishing shut down, a restocking effort began, and some thirty million walleye fry were released into the lake. Restocking was repeated in 2001 and 2003. By 2006, the lake reopened ahead of schedule with an estimated population of 7.5 million walleyes.