(pleasant music) - Coming up on "Prairie Sportsman," we pay tribute to the late Pauly Larson with a memorial fishing tournament in his honor on Lac Qui Parle Lake.

Next, we bring in the latest on the Marsh Lake Ecosystem Restoration Project with DNR fisheries biologist Chris Domeier, and finally we head downstream on the Pomme de Terre River where researchers are conducting surveys for new mussel colonies.

"Prairie Sportsman" starts right now.

(lively music) - [Narrator] Funding for "Prairie Sportsman" is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, as recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources, and by Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota on the web at shalomhillfarm.org, and by Live Wide Open, and Western Minnesota Prairie Waters.

(somber music) - [Bret] Paul Larson was born to be outdoors.

Growing up in Big Bend, a little village on the western Minnesota prairies, he loved to hunt and fish.

When Paul started dating his future wife Nikki, much of their courtship was spent in a fishing boat and they passed their love for angling on to their three children.

The US postal worker had a close group of friends who fished together in walleye tournaments throughout Minnesota.

They called him Pauly.

In August 2017, at the age of 39, Pauly died of a heart attack, leaving behind grief-stricken family and friends.

In his memory, they carried on plans for a fishing tournament on Lac Qui Parle Lake that Paul envisioned would raise money for local high school scholarships.

(reflective music) - The tournament started with a conversation with Paul and myself and Angel and a couple other people to take the place of the Megan Bothun Memorial Fishing Tournament that they ran for 10 years.

She was a gal from Montevideo that died in a car accident and her family put a an event on for her and they did very similar, raised money for scholarships and in her name.

(reflective music) - And we were just in the really very early beginning stages of planning that tournament when unfortunately he passed away.

- Just never expected.

I mean, the guy walked six days a week relatively good health, played college football.

I mean, to this day it's still surreal.

- Very strong personality, very fun.

Everyone, when he came into a room, everyone was smiling and happy.

- I mean, I was working night shift and for some reason I was up, six o'clock in the morning and Josh Moen had called me and I got to the hospital parking lot and Rief was pulling at the same time, and I've seen a lot of things over 20 years in law enforcement.

Probably one of the toughest, toughest days of my life.

(reflective music) - Corey and I met then that night of the prayer service or the visitation at the funeral and the first thing we said to each other was, come hell or high water, we are having this tournament in memory of Paul, and yeah, that's how it started.

- There's a lot of good people that step up for this tournament and they haven't looked back, but it's the same thing.

You know, around Pauly's funeral, you know, there's 13 people there saying that he's their best friend.

(tender music) - Fishing was a huge part of our family, something that we did a lot of.

Weekends, always out on the boat or fishing from shore, so this was just kind of an obvious route to take after he passed away.

- When we first started it, we had a goal in mind, you know, to help kids, but as it grew, there were so many people that want to be involved that now it's kind of blossomed out.

You know, we've got three scholarships set up and if everything continues on the same pace, we'll be able to have endowments in his name, you know from Montevideo, Dawson, and Lac Qui Parle, so definitely more than we ever imagined when we first kind of put our heads together to do this.

- The money that we donate for scholarships to students is you know, it's something that he would've loved that we did in his name.

- There's a core group of about a dozen people that are participating in almost every committee meeting that we do, volunteering to help get things lined up, going out and working with our sponsors.

We got a great group of sponsors that help us make this event possible.

(folksy music) - Guys are down at the landing by 4:35 in the morning.

We're checking boats in and guys are getting on the water.

- [Bret] Paul Larson's dad leads with the first boat out.

- [Angel] He plays the national anthem and you know, carries the American flag.

It gives you goosebumps.

- [Bret] Almost 70 teams are participating, and each paid a $250 entry fee.

- [Angel] We get people from all over fishing in this tournament, all over the state of Minnesota, South Dakota.

We've had people from Wisconsin, Iowa.

- I know we've had a few participants from Colorado through the years.

Montana, you know, we have a good, good local following as well that have known Paul.

Some don't fish a lot of tournaments but it means a lot to them to participate in one like this, and.

- [Fisherman] I like to see the teams with the husbands and wives, the sons and daughters, or dad fishing with 'em or mom fishing with 'em.

Those are the teams that I'm secretly rooting for.

(upbeat music) - [Cory] All right, let's rock.

Little bit more.

Keep reeling.

Keep reeling.

(Lainey groaning) keep reeling.

(Lainey giggling) - [Lainey] Can't get it.

(fish splashing) - [Cory] There you go.

We got a northern.

- My arm hurts.

That was so heavy.

I really hope it's a big walleye.

It feels pretty heavy.

Whoa, it seems heavy.

(fish splashing) Is it?

- [Cory] This is a crappie.

Big crappie.

- [Lainey] Yeah, if only that was a sheephead.

(lively music) - [Cory] Crappie.

- Really thought it was a sheephead.

We're catching a lot of fish but just not the fish that we want.

- [Cory] Keep your pole that a way.

- I'm trying.

- [Cory] A little that a way.

(fish flapping) That's one we haven't caught.

- [Lainey] Is that a catfish?

- [Cory] Yep, that is a big catfish, Lainey.

We're doing a good job finding species for the camera.

- [Lainey] Yes, just not walleyes.

- [Bret] While Cory Reifenberger and his daughter Lainey are hooking just about everything but the Minnesota state fish, Sean Joyce and his son Creed are having better luck with walleye.

- This might be a good walleye, or a northern.

Guessing it's a sheephead.

(reel whining) Let's go, that's a walleye, Dad.

- [Sean] Is it?

- Yeah, grab the net.

That's a good one.

(net splashing) Nice.

(motor rumbling) - [Sean] All right.

Gotta get a tag.

- Yeah, it's in here.

Through the gill.

(tag snapping) - Now, put it in the cooler.

(twangy music) - [Creed] That's a walleye, that's a big one.

(upbeat music) (net splashing) That's at least 20 inches.

Hey, now we don't need to worry about the other fish.

- [Bret] The Joyces head in for weigh-ins that start at 4:00 p.m. (folksy country music) Boats line up on Milan's Main Street, which shuts down for the tournament.

Everyone enjoys food, drinks, and door prizes while waiting for results.

- What we do in this event is, we weigh the five best walleyes.

The teams can bring in a total of six, weighing their five best.

To make it a little bit different, we also have a prize for the largest sheephead that is caught in the event.

- [Bret] The biggest payouts go to the top placers in total walleye weights, ranging from $750 for seventh place to $5,000 for first.

- Brian and Cody Greve, 7.6 pounds.

Your $5,000 winner and your 2022 champions.

(crowd clapping) (reflective music) - [Fisher] Every year it seems like it's getting bigger, more sponsors.

We're hoping to keep increasing the payout and giving back to the kids, giving back to Paul's kids.

- [Participant] It's something, we're trying to bring a little life to these small towns.

- You know, we said we were gonna do it for 10 years, and after 10 years we'll just have to see.

This is year five and yeah, we can't make any promises, but whether we continue the tournament or we don't continue the actual tournament, I can guarantee you that you know, Paul's memory's gonna live on.

- Once you met him, you always remembered him.

So, I mean, I just, I love everyone who comes out and to support him and support the schools and scholarships for kids in the area, I mean, that's why we do this.

- [Friend] He would take the shirt off his back for anybody.

So by us having this for other people, just kind of continues a torch.

(upbeat music) - [Chris] There is a tremendous number of young-of-year crappies in Marsh Lake right now.

- [Bret] To find out if the mussels recolonized in the river.

Mike and his team of biologists went underwater.

(water gurgling) In 2017, the Marsh Lake Ecosystem Restoration Project began.

One component of the project was a drawdown cycle to help restore natural vegetation.

Now that everything's complete, there's a number of ongoing research projects to monitor the results.

We met up with Chris Domeier to get an update.

- So we're trying to see what kind of reproduction we had up here in Marsh Lake this year.

- [Bret] Nets were set to capture a certain size of fish to determine recent reproduction rates.

(cheery music) - And as you see, just by taking a quick dip in here, numerous species of fish to give you an idea of the number, it's just outrageous the production we get in this new system that's recently flooded with all this vegetation and good water quality.

Taking a look at just some fish, here's a bluegill, and this is probably that these are probably bluegills actually from last year.

They're probably yearlings that have moved up into this system or they've come down from Big Stone Lake.

Fish move and they move, you know, both directions.

The secret is with this fishway is they can move when they need to and where they need to, and all sizes of fish can move.

So this is really good to see.

This is a great thing to see here, the young-of-year perch that's probably been produced in Marsh Lake.

They may have come from Big Stone, but there's a lot of 'em in this net.

I'm assuming we had some good perch production out here.

Here's a really important species and real common.

This is a big mouth buffalo, young-of-year.

A lot of buffalo were using this fishway this spring.

Very important species for forage.

Here's something I'm really glad to see a lot of, young-of-the-year black crappies.

So these fish, we haven't been seeing quite as many young as I'd hoped in Lac Qui Parle the last few years.

There is a tremendous number of young-of-year crappies in Marsh Lake right now and they will, of course, a lot of 'em will move down and help the Lac Qui Parle fishery as time goes on.

We're not gonna get by without having some of these.

This is a young-of-year common carp.

We know we're gonna have carp production out here no matter what, but one of the secrets is, is having this really diverse fish population with all these other species that compete with carp eat carp eggs, eat little carp.

As you can see, years ago, this probably would be mostly carp in my hands before this project was completed.

Now we've got all these other species out here doing well and they're gonna help keep carp numbers down.

(upbeat folk music) - [Bret] The goal was that the new vegetation would help improve more than just fish populations in Marsh Lake, and Chris has some other tools to monitor these changes.

- It's called the T Tube.

It's got a little white and black disc in the bottom and I've been taking these readings out here, oh, for the last three years, trying to keep track of what the water clarity's been doing in the system.

It's pretty easy.

You just fill it full of water and you stare down this tube in the shade and you pull the string and you're gonna see that little disc sooner or later where you can tell the difference between the black triangles and the white triangles, and when you get that spot, you wanna get it locked in.

This clarity's pretty good today and I'd say right about there.

So then you just take a a reading, this is in centimeters.

So we got about 75 centimeters of water clarity.

During the bad years, the typical water readings out here were about anywhere from, I'd say five to 10 centimeters only.

It was like chocolate milk.

So right now when we're seeing something at 75 centimeters this is really good, really nice water clarity.

- [Bret] And you can't forget about the little guys.

- So this little net is designed just to catch real little fish.

You know, everybody likes big fish, but this is where it all starts.

All these little fish are the food for everything else out there.

Some of these are little bluegills.

There's some little darters in here, as you can see, and there's some little shiners in there.

I think that one is a little emerald shiner or two of them.

So these are the little fish that are swimming around, eating the zooplankton.

Everything really starts with the zooplankton feeding these fish.

The zooplankton eat the microscopic algae.

So the water clarity's important because to have a lot of zooplankton, you can't have all that dirt floating around in the water clogging up the system, clogging up their feeding mechanisms, and you don't get the phytoplankton produced that you need.

So you want kind of green water, and that's what the zooplankton are feeding on, and then these fish eat the zooplankton and all the little fish feed everything else, and almost with most of our species of fish in this area, if they can fit a fish in their mouth they're going to eat it, regardless of the species.

Everything's almost eating everything else.

So the idea is to have a real diverse fishery out there.

The fish will figure it out, they'll do just fine.

They'll produce high numbers given the habitat conditions of whatever's most suited for that habitat.

So good habitat, good numbers of fish, and ultimately good fishing.

That's really the whole story and that's what the whole Marsh Lake, you know, project was about when we started talking about the fishery out here.

- So looking back now on where we're at from when the project was completed, how would you grade it?

- Nature last year gave us perfect conditions for a drawdown, had tremendous vegetation response the last two years.

This year we've had nice rains, good water levels.

As you can see, the water levels are really nice.

It's been perfect honestly.

We couldn't have had better conditions since the project's been completed than what we've had.

So it's been really nice to see.

(upbeat music) (curious music) - [Bret] Minnesota is known for its wide range of wildlife.

The second largest group of animals in the world are found in abundance in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, but their existence is threatened by changing landscapes and water quality degradation.

These animals aren't widely known to area residents, but the work they do should be.

(curious music) Mussels are part of the animal group, the mollusks.

Minnesota has 51 different mussels, with 28 of them listed as endangered, threatened, or of special concern.

Their relationship with fish is hard to believe, and they have one of the most important jobs that takes place beneath the surface.

They clean the water.

- Well, they have an ecological role of cleaning the river that's pretty important, and that's not just one of being food for somebody else.

They filter the water and in doing that, they're removing nutrients and processing them into other forms in their bodies and their shells for one thing, but they also eat stuff like plankton and bacteria even.

Bacteria's one of their favorite foods.

So they glean all that outta the river.

So they're kind of cleaning the water as they go, and then when they get abundant they create these little microhabitats around them that support more species of algae, and the algae then feed more different types of algae-eating insect larvae and other invertebrates and then fish get more to eat from that.

So it becomes kind of a positive feedback loop.

So the fish come where the mussels are to feed, and then the mussels can get their larvae on the fish and it perpetuates itself.

Kind of cool thing.

- [Bret] Mussels are reliant on fish.

They lure them close, their larvae attaches to their gills, and then they disperse around the body of water.

Then they release from the host fish and start to grow.

In 2017, the Minnesota DNR had a dilemma.

With the rerouting of the Pomme de Terre River scheduled to take place as part of the $12 million Marsh Lake ecosystem restoration project, there was a section of river that would stop flowing, and any mussels living there would be abandoned.

- Well, we moved the mussels outta of harm's way in 2017, I believe, and in 2018 the, the old channel was, I guess they opened it up to allow water to flow through the old channel in the fall of 2018.

(playful music) - [Bret] Now four years later, it was time to see if it worked.

- We're looking to see if the mussels have recolonized this reconstituted old channel of the Pomme de Terre River.

- [Bret] Mike Davis is a river ecologist who has been part of the mussel relocation process on the Pomme de Terre River since the beginning.

- So rather than just letting them die, we moved them out of harm's way, but we didn't put 'em in the new channel because we wanted to see how quickly the new channel would recolonize from fish moving through with the larval mussels on their gills.

Nobody's ever done this far as we know, anywhere in, not in this country anyway.

I mean, we have river restoration projects going on but we've never had almost a mile and a half of river channel that had been abandoned for about 75 years, maybe, something like that, that we knew no mussels lived in anymore.

So this was a great chance to see how long it takes for mussels to come back into a river.

(upbeat music) - [Bret] To find out if the mussels recolonized in the river, Mike and his team of biologists went underwater.

(water gurgling) - To sort of spread out across the river, those of us without scuba gear were limited to where we can reach the bottom with our hands.

(upbeat music) They could go under in the deep water 'cause there were places six feet or more deep and you know, they could be on the bottom and finding mussels there, which they did.

So there were mussels in shallow water and in deep water, and we just floated along feeling the bottom, running my fingers through the sand.

(water gurgling) You learn to feel what a mussel feels like and when you do, you grab it, pull it out see what it looks like, and put it in your bag.

After an hour we stopped and counted up what everybody caught.

We measured to see how long they were and also how old they were.

You get some idea of growth and so forth that way.

Think this one's four.

- [Researcher] Got it.

- Got it.

- [Student] That little tiny thing.

Geez, that was.

- Of course.

So there's a Wabash.

- [Mike] With a gentle touch.

- Pig toe and a black sandshell.

- [Diver] Hurt my finger.

- Yes, I got your.

- [Diver] I was sifting through rocks and gravel.

- [Mike] Yeah, I looked at a lot of them.

(upbeat music) - This is part of the Marsh Lake ecosystem restoration project.

It's been a long time coming.

I started working on it in 2014, but it started well before that.

I work on quite a few restoration projects for the Corps, and mussels always come up in all of my projects.

It's always something that we're concerned about and that always come up.

Whenever we talk about restoration, we're always talking about fish and mussels always come up.

- Look at there, it's got this little byssal thread that it tethers itself to the river bottom with.

Isn't that cool?

Boingy boingy boingy.

(Mike laughing) - [Researcher] How'd that go?

- Boingy, boingy, boingy.

It's like a bungee cord, you know?

Okay, it's one year old.

I don't wanna drop it in the bag 'cause it'll probably get smooshed.

Okay, this one is one, two, three, four years old.

- [Interviewer] How do you figure that out?

- Like tree rings, they have growth arrest lines in the winter, so it leaves a mark on the shell where they stop building shell and then when they start again it leaves another smoother layer.

- [Bret] After compiling the data, they realize that no mussel was older than four years old, which makes sense since this project took place four years ago.

- What I did expect and didn't see were some older mussels that may have washed in during a flood or something.

We didn't find evidence for that at all.

So these have all come off of fish that are coming in and now some of 'em are old enough to start reproducing here which means they'll inoculate fish with their larvae as they swim through and that should help build the populations back even faster.

- [Bret] The Pomme de Terre River is back to its original channel and functioning the way a river should be.

- It looks really good, it looks natural.

I mean that's the goal really is to make it a natural functioning stream and not look like, you know, people have been messing with it.

- [Bret] And since mussels have been found in a part of the river that hasn't been there in almost 80 years, means the project was a success.

- Kind of cool.

They may be coming from the Minnesota River upstream but they could be coming down the Pomme de Terre River heading to the Minnesota, and as they swim by, these little guys are dropping off, starting their lives in the river.

- The project is complete, but we are in a 10 year adaptive management monitoring plan where we keep monitoring it, and so this mussel survey is part of that.

- I'd like to see us come back again in about five years and see what, and then we can compare what we found this time to the next time, and then we can use the number of mussels to come up with a catch rate, so the number of mussels we caught per hour, per minute, depending on the abundance.

- [Bret] Rerouting the Pomme de Terre River was a major project.

Discovering that the mussels and their fish hosts have adapted to their new river channel means the hard work paid off.

Moving forward, this should mean a healthy mussel population which helps clean the water and benefits the fish of the Minnesota River system.

(curious music) - [Narrator] Funding for "Prairie Sportsman" is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources, and by Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota on the web at shalomhillfarm.org, and by Live Wide Open, and Western Minnesota Prairie Waters.