The amount of yellow perch harvested in the Saginaw Bay continues to decline, according to the latest data collected by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
David Fielder, a biologist with DNR fisheries division, said in comparison to years past, the current harvest rates are almost zero.
“The recreational fishery this past year, 2025, harvested 194,000 yellow perch,” Fielder said. “Now, that sounds like a big number, but that's just a fraction of what historically we were able to harvest out of that population, as many as half a million some previous years.”
State data shows the yellow perch population in the Saginaw Bay has been consistently decreasing since the late 1980s.
Fielder said the decline is not a result of commercial or recreational fishing. The perch are reproducing very well, he said, but intense predation in the Bay makes it difficult for young perch to reach adulthood.
Their biggest predator is walleye. Fielder said the walleye population has boomed in recent years, and with the absence of other food sources like alewives, they’ve been primarily preying on the perch.
Lakon Williams is the operations manager for the Bay Port Fish Company, a commercial fishery in the thumb. She her fishery stopped fishing for yellow perch in 2019.
“It's not economically feasible for our company to go out and catch 1,000 pounds [of] perch a year,” Williams said. “That's only about $3,500, that doesn't even pay for my gas for the whole year. We stopped fishing because we just don't see harming the population further and we weren't making any money.”
In order to curb the threat predators pose to yellow perch, the DNR has deployed several strategies. Among them was the reintroduction of cisco, another walleye favorite, into the water. But the cisco haven’t created as much of a buffer in predation as they’d hoped.
The DNR also started to remove cormorants from the bay, so that perch would face less predation from the skies. Fielder said the birds eat about 17% as much perch as the walleye, and while containment efforts are ongoing, it’s not making a huge difference.
They also altered harvesting policies, decreasing the legal amount of yellow perch to fish from the bay to 25 from 50. In line with that, the DNR increased the limit on the recreational harvest of walleye.
“That didn't work,” Fielder said. “I think we did make a small dent, but the reproductive success of walleye just compensated. It just increased.”
Fielder went on to say the DNR has explored the idea of allowing the commercial fishing of walleye, but at this point, the population is too big for it to be effective.
“What we learned from our earlier experiments is that that's just really not a viable strategy,” he said. “In order to really bring them down now to the level that might benefit yellow perch, we would probably have to fish them so hard that we would virtually have to over harvest them before we're going to get them down to that point.”
Williams, on the other hand, said the DNR should tighten the quota for the perch catch, and open it up for walleye.
“It frustrates me, because it's just common sense biology like you learned in high school,” she said. “If you have way too much predators at the top of the food chain, and you don't fix the food problem, well, what eventually happens is the food chain, it's going to collapse. And this is absolutely not what we want.”
Despite the lack of success the DNR is seeing, Fielder said they will be continuing to find ways to try and revitalize the perch population.
“There's just no easy answers, and we have to take the long game really to try to see if we can realize any sort of other sorts of changes that might benefit them,” Fielder said.
Yellow perch are an easy fish to catch, he said, and their accessibility makes them very popular in the world of recreational fishing.
Last year, recreational angling generated about $60 million in economic activity in the Saginaw Bay region.
