Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025
What's a saugeye? Grand Lake anglers may find out
By William Kincaid
ST. MARYS - Ohio Department of Natural Resources officials will attempt to make Grand Lake a great place to fish for saugeye, a hybrid cross between female walleye and male sauger that makes for an exciting catch and a delicious meal.
Details about the Grand Lake saugeye experiment were revealed during the 2025 Sport Fish Restoration Partner with a Payer event held Tuesday at the St. Marys State Fish Hatchery, which featured state and federal officials.
Plans call for stocking Grand Lake with up to 135,000 1- to 2-inch saugeye fingerlings each spring through 2030, according to ODNR Division of Wildlife Inland Fisheries Program Administrator Richard D. Zweifel.
More precisely, the fish set to be released in Grand Lake are triploid saugeye. They contain an extra set of DNA, rendering them sterile and non-threatening to the genetic integrity of walleye at Lake Erie, which contribute about $1 billion annually to the state's economy.
Zweifel has high hopes for the shallow, 13,500-acre Grand Lake, which he called one of Ohio's most productive reservoirs.
"All of the other canal reservoirs that are similar -Buckeye Lake and Indiana Lake that's just to the east of here - they're two of our premier saugeye fisheries inland. We suspect that Grand Lake will be a very successful saugeye fishery," Zweifel said. "We have high expectation that this is going to take off in the next couple of years."
Anglers have long clamored for ODNR to stock sauger at Grand Lake.
"They taste just like a walleye. Our reservoir habitats are not as conducive to walleye as they are to saugeye," Zweifel said. "Saugeye is a hybrid of walleye. So they taste just like walleye, they look like a walleye, they are similar, but their life history is more suited for the habitats of the reservoirs than the walleye is."
The overall body color of a saugeye is also intermediate between the gray to silver color of a walleye and the bronze or brown color of a sauger, according to ODNR's website. The average length of adults is 12-18 inches, but they can reach 30 inches on occasion. Adults usually weigh 1-2 pounds, but they can sometimes weigh up to 14 pounds.
Grand Lake drains to both the Ohio River and Lake Erie watersheds, Zweifel pointed out. Because saugeye are fertile, ODNR has not in recent times stocked the hybrid in reservoirs that drain directly into the tributaries of Lake Erie, where 500,000 anglers spent 3.7 million hours in 2024 fishing for walleye.
"We know that saugeye are fertile … and that Lake Erie is the walleye capital of the world. So we're very protective of our Lake Erie walleye population," Zweifel said. "So out of an abundance of caution, we do not stock saugeye in any reservoir, any water in the Lake Erie watershed where they could potentially end up in the lake."
With that in mind, ODNR researchers have doggedly pursued a way to stock saugeye in Grand Lake without impinging on the Lake Erie walleye population. Researchers thought they had found the answer back in 2009 and 2010 in the form of triploid saugeye.
"Triploids basically are organisms that have three sets of chromosomes. They are sterile. They do not reproduce. It's common in agriculture. So seedless watermelons and seedless bananas are common forms of triploid plants. It's also well-established in fish," Zweifel said, adding that triploid rainbow trout are commonly stocked throughout the U.S.
In 2009 and 2010, the state stocked Grand Lake with 219,124 triploid saugeye, a St. Marys Hatchery official told The Daily Standard in 2015.
The problem was the pressure shock treatment used to induce triploidy at the time resulted in the near complete destruction of saugeye eggs.
"After the eggs are fertilized, you put them in a pressure chamber, put them under tremendous pressure for 10 minutes, 12 minutes, and it does induce triploidy," Zweifel said. "However, it kills 95% of the eggs that you put in."
The project was put on hold as research resumed.
"This was not really sustainable, given the resources that we had," he said.
A pair of projects were undertaken, one of which "revolutionized our fertilization procedure, production procedure with saugeye reproduction."
"Project FIDR25, which is still ongoing, looked at optimizing … the triploidy induction procedures," Zweifel said. "We went from 5% survival when we first started doing this to about 20% egg survival in our most recent trials last year."
Researchers are now to the point where they think they can proceed with the saugeye experiment in Grand Lake.
"So we just started putting triploid eggs in the hatchery system, basically today," Zweifel told the newspaper. "They're going to start at Hebron (State Fish Hatchery) … and then they're going to come here, eventually, to St. Marys."
After hatching at St. Marys, the triploid saugeye will be placed in ponds for up to a month and then transferred to Grand Lake, likely in mid-May. Officials aim to release roughly 135,000 1- to 2-inch saugeye fingerlings.
"We know from research that when you hold fish longer and stock them when water temperatures are a little warmer, that the gizzard shad (food source) start to spawn and there's lot of prey in the lake. When you stock those fish at that time they have much higher survival," Zweifel said. "We'll go in the fall and assess them, see what we've got."
It will take about a year for the fish to reach a catchable size for anglers.
"What we know about Grand Lake St. Marys is that it's a very productive system. All the sport fish that reside in Grand Lake grow like weeds," he said. "We suspect that the saugeye are going to grow really fast, so they'll be roughly 10 to 12 inches, probably by October, and then next year in the summer and fall, we'll have some fish that are 13, 14, 15 inches."
ODNR won't know if the program is a success for at least a few years.
"We're still easing into this triploid production," Zweifel said. "This is our first attempt at ramping up production numbers that we think will actually produce a fishery here at Grand Lake. So I would say within the next five years we'll sort of know whether we can produce enough fish to make a successful fishery."
The project would not be possible without the Sport Fish Restoration Program, Zweifel said.
The program provides funds to fish and wildlife agencies of the states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories for fishery projects, boating access and aquatic education. It was created in 1950, with the passing of the Sport Fish Restoration Act, which is also known as the Dingell-Johnson Act, according to U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services.
Revenue comes from manufacturers' excise taxes on sport fishing equipment, import duties on fishing tackle and pleasure boats, and the portion of the gasoline fuel tax attributable to small engines and motorboats.
