June 03, 2025
May 12, 2025, was no ordinary day at the Oden State Fish Hatchery in Alanson, Michigan. The facility that raises brown and rainbow trout for Michigan waters was host to another species – Arctic grayling, a fish that hasn’t been native to the state in nearly 100 years.
In a special ceremony, the Department of Natural Resources provided an estimated 400,000 Arctic grayling eggs to the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, and the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.
Pictured: Frank Beaver, Natural Resource Department director of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, at Arctic grayling event.
These partners will reintroduce the eggs at locations along the North Branch of the Manistee River, the Maple River and the Boardman-Ottaway River.
Arctic grayling were once prevalent in Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula. Today, they’re native only to Montana and Alaska in the U.S.
Known to the Anishinaabek as nmégos, they were an important food for Michigan’s northern Native American tribes. Later, the town of Grayling had a thriving Arctic grayling fishery in the Au Sable River.
Northern Michigan streams attracted anglers from throughout the Midwest to catch these beautiful fish with a large and colorful dorsal fin.
Pictured: Randy Claramunt, Chief of the Fisheries Division, Michigan Department of Natural Resources, at the Arctic grayling event.
As the area became settled, rivers like the Au Sable, Manistee, and Muskegon floated logs to sawmills, destroying the Arctic grayling’s habitat. Overfishing and the introduction of brown trout also hurt grayling populations.
Native Americans’ culture developed alongside this iconic fish. Tribes have felt its absence for generations.
By 1936, Arctic grayling had disappeared from Michigan streams.
A few reintroduction attempts in the late 1980s were unsuccessful. But over time, habitat and water quality have improved through landmark laws in the 1970s that addressed industrial pollution, reforestation, removal of dams, and stream habitat improvements.
Now, an Arctic grayling comeback effort is underway.
Pictured: Arctic grayling in aquarium.
The Michigan Arctic Grayling Initiative (MAGI), begun in 2015, brings together anglers and other groups and governments. MAGI’s nearly 50 members include tribal partners such as the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, which had already started investigating streams in the Manistee River Watershed for potential Arctic grayling introduction.
MAGI and others have been working to understand and overcome the barriers to successful grayling reintroduction.
The 1980s reintroduction efforts raised fish in hatcheries and stocked them in rivers. But that didn’t allow the Arctic grayling to imprint to a stream.
Montana successfully restored Arctic grayling by placing screened buckets with fertilized eggs in suitable stream habitats, allowing newly hatched fish to imprint and larval and juvenile grayling to survive.
MAGI has solved many questions and met several milestones on the path to bringing Arctic grayling back:
Meanwhile, similar efforts are underway to restore river-spawning populations of lake whitefish – the Great Lakes’ most important commercial fishery. Their numbers in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron their numbers have fallen for 15 years, threatening the future of the fishery and a Michigan cultural touchstone – especially for Indigenous communities.
Densities of zooplankton the young fish rely on have declined in the two lakes because of invasive quagga mussels filtering out nutrients.
Lake whitefish spawn in the Great Lakes, but historically many also migrated up rivers in the fall and spawned in rocky riffles and rapids.
In the spring, the hatched whitefish would drift downstream into ideal nursery habitat: zooplankton-rich Great Lakes river estuary waters.
Like salmon and Arctic grayling, lake whitefish imprint on and return to the place where they hatched to spawn.
Most lake whitefish spawning runs were lost during Michigan’s logging era as rocky habitat filled with sediment and dams blocked migration upstream. Few contemporary populations now migrate upstream.
In Michigan, biologists from the Bay Mills Indian Community, Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and The Nature Conservancy are studying reestablishing river spawning runs in Michigan.
The partners have conducted fall surveys in Lake Michigan and northern Lake Huron tributary rivers since 2018 to identify remnant river populations and to find habitats that might best support reintroduction.
Since 2022, eggs and young lake whitefish have been introduced into select tributaries to study feasibility and determine how stocked juveniles fare.
Outcomes from these efforts will provide impactful recommendations for restoring tributary lake whitefish runs in the future, expanding efforts to bring back the lake whitefish.
Adapted from articles by Jay Wesley of DNR and Matt Herbert of The Nature Conservancy in the 2024 Michigan State of the Great Lakes Report.
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