Minnesota DNR plans fisheries survey on the Red Lake River

May 29, 2023

GRAND FORKS — The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is planning a fisheries survey on the Red Lake River this month in an effort to learn more about the fish community in the key Red River tributary.

The Red Lake River originates at Lower Red Lake on the Red Lake Indian Reservation and meanders 193 miles before flowing into the Red River at East Grand Forks.

"We’re really trying to just get a handle on how things are going there," said Nick Kludt, Red River fisheries specialist for the DNR in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota.

Fisheries personnel from the DNR's area fisheries office in Detroit Lakes will conduct the survey.

Besides gamefish species such as walleyes, channel catfish, smallmouth bass and northern pike, the Red Lake River actually has "a pretty robust population" of redhorse, a nongame species that includes greater redhorse, shorthead redhorse and golden and silver redhorse.

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"Those species are kind of understudied, and one of the things we’re going to try to do during the Red Lake River survey is collect age structure data on those," Kludt said. "That way, we can get a little better handle on what are the population dynamics of those species in this major (Red River) tributary."

Biologists age fish by cutting a cross section of the otolith, a bone in the inner ear, and counting the rings, similar to the technique for aging a tree. The study of redhorse is part of a larger statewide interest in nongame native fish species in the state, Kludt said.

"With the expansion of the (DNR's) catch-and-release program, No. 1, we have more and more anglers targeting some of these native fishes – and then the ability to be recognized for being able to target them and really target surprisingly large ones," he said.

Redhorse and other sucker species are an integral part of the prey base in both the Red Lake and Red rivers. And since the DNR had scheduled a survey on the Red Lake River anyway, this seemed like a good time to learn more about the various redhorse species, Kludt said.

"It's good to know something about them," he said. "They’ve been harvested for generations in Minnesota, whether it's going back to our spearing season or kind of the more modern rise of bow fishing. There has always been this fishery around the sucker species, yet we really haven't devoted a lot of time to understanding them."

The bulk of the survey, which will involve setting trap nets, will focus on the Crookston stretch of the Red Lake River. Crews will then come back in the fall and electrofish the river as part of a more widespread effort, Kludt said.

The DNR during the summer of 2022 sampled the mainstem Red River from its source at Wahpeton-Breckenridge to the Manitoba border. Crews from area DNR fisheries offices in Fergus Falls, Detroit Lakes and Baudette divvied up the workload.

The Red River assessment, conducted every five years since 1990, was originally scheduled for 2020 but was postponed until 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Crews sampled 27 fish species along the U.S. portion of the Red, Kludt said, not including minnows and other species too small for the gear to catch.

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In addition, the North Dakota Game and Fish Department, which shares management of the Red River with Minnesota, funded a creel survey on the Red River during the summer of 2022. Anglers logged an estimated 63,057 hours of fishing pressure on the U.S. portion of the river, down from 88,860 hours during the last survey in 2015 and 121,269 hours during the 2010 creel survey. Like the riverwide fisheries assessment, the Red River creel survey was originally scheduled for 2020 but postponed until last year because of the pandemic.

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