Fishermen travel near and far to Lake Erie tributaries every year for a chance to reel in a steelhead trout, a fish that some say offers one of the best fights you can get with a rod in your hands.
But behind the scenes, maintaining the steelhead population in Lake Erie takes a little help from artificial spawning, and Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission held its very first collection of the season along Trout Run at Avonia Beach.
“I believe there’s six to eight of them scheduled for this year, but what we’re doing here today is we’re collecting males and females out of the stream. We’re taking the ripe females and males up to the spawning shed. We’re spawning five females to three males, and we’re producing the future of the steelhead program,” said Mark Haffley, Lake Erie Research Unit Leader with the PA Fish and Boat Commission…