(upbeat intro jingle) - [Bret] Join us for an annual friends trip to Lake of the Woods on Prairie Sportsman.

- Tommy.

I'm 83, trapped in the body of a 43-year-old.

(all laughing) - Yep.

I got news for you.

I knew you when you were 43, and you looked 83.

- [Bret] Plus track the menace of Spiny Water Fleas.

I'm Bret Amundson and it's time for a brand new episode of Prairie Sportsman.

(upbeat percussive theme 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.

Mark and Margaret Yeakel Jolene on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Live Wide Open Western Minnesota Prairie Waters and the members of Pioneer PBS - [Bret Amundson] Fishing traditions come in many forms, from opening day destinations, family vacations and more.

Today we're gonna meet a group of friends who started going fishing together when they were coworkers, but they have continued the tradition long after they retired.

Do you have more fun fishing on these trips or giving these guys a hard time?

(all laughing) - That's, that's a good question.

- [Speaker 1] I think that's very well put.

- Yeah, good one.

- [Speaker 1] Great question.

- Who put you up to that?

- [Bret] Nobody needed to.

(all laughing) (upbeat jazzy music) - [Bret] In the 1980s, a handful of employees from Minnesota based 3M that shared a love of the outdoors started going on fishing trips.

Those adventures have created a colorful tradition that continues to this day.

In 2023, they traveled to Artisan's Rocky Point at Lake of the Woods?

- Yeah.

We're the Walleye Whackers.

- Yeah.

- [Speaker 2] Yeah.

Where'd that come from?

- We got shirts.

- I dunno.

- Well, the first year I, I believe it was 1987.

- Might be about 1989, 1988, something like that.

I started coming.

- As, I best, as I can tell, I came in 86.

- I think it was 1988 that it started and we stayed in tents and we woke up in the morning and there was snow covering the tents.

- They pitched their tents on some bear guts or something, - Fish guts.

- Fish guts, 'cause people cleaned their fish there.

But we survived and got through that first year and - Oh, that's where we had a little football game and, and we didn't have a football, so we used a lighter fluid can.

Jansen, I think he was a quarterback, so he wasn't good at catching and it hit him in the mouth and had blood all over his face.

(all laughing) - Well, one thing about this group, we, we, yeah, we can dish it out, but we can all take it too.

So it's, you know, it's all in fun, that's for sure.

And I wanna say, you know, the core group, I think started in maybe oh, - Another year?

- because this if my first ER trip, which is some of the core group, was in 74, so next year would be 50 for me.

- Wow.

- All right.

Denny, how's it feel?

- It feels pretty good.

- Yeah.

- Dan's gonna get the net behind you here.

- Probably gonna sneak in between you guys.

- [Denny] Yeah, it's pretty good.

(water sloshing) - I think this is a good fish.

Denny.

- It feels good.

- I saw your bottom bouncer for a second.

- [Bret] Oh, there it is right there.

- Yeah.

That's a good fish.

- Oh yeah, that's a good fish.

- Nice.

- Nice job.

- Very nice.

- We like it.

- Oh, very nice.

Very nice.

- Thank you.

- Very nice.

- That's a good one.

- 25 maybe.

- Yeah.

- Oh yeah.

- [Bret] They're kind of got some good bellies on 'em too.

- Well, they're Lake of the Woods fish, Bret, they all got good bellies on them.

- That was the first fish I've caught with this rod that Ron Jansen made for me.

- [Bret] He's made a lot of rods and I think mine's a Saint Croix blank, but I don't have a, I don't have a snake skin wrap on mine.

- He makes a nice rod.

- I would say that all of the walleye's caught on the, or most of the walleyes caught on the trip, this time would be on Jansen's rods.

- Oh yeah.

- Yep.

- 2005 maybe I went to a class and a lot of 'em are unique 'cause I used, I used snake again for a lot of the design and I turned my own handles and fore grips and, - [Bret] And you put names - And get engraved, and it's frankly kind of paid for itself.

I mean, I don't make a lot of money, I make I make - Well you charge a lot.

(group laughing) - Yeah.

- [Bret] With this group, sitting back and listening to the stories is just as much fun as the fishing.

- We, we have the same stories every year and we laugh just as hard every time and we just, I don't know, we just have a good time.

It's been great coming back here every year.

- [Bret] You, Is it the same stories every year?

Do you enjoy 'em more and more because you start forgetting them?

(laughing) - We do now.

- We do now, - Yeah.

- Pretty well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

- Did you tell that story before?

- [Bret] While spending a lot of the time fishing has remained a constant over the years.

It still takes a backseat to the fun these guys like to have.

- 'Cause we used to have a test called the spark plug test to see who was most manly.

Well, I've got this lawnmower with three plugs.

I've got this riding mower with four plugs.

I've got this snowblower and you know, it went around the table.

And nowadays one of this group last night mentioned the newest test should be a pill count.

See who has the most pills in the group.

- We're all getting the age where who knows how, how much longer it'll last.

But we're still having fun.

- This is really getting to me depressing.

- You know, we're all getting older.

I'm 73 and there's a few boys around here that are 10 years older than me.

- Why you looking at me?

Yeah.

- Well I just, - looking over here for?

- I just kind of glanced over, but, but you know, and everything comes an end.

But I, I would do this as long as I can.

- There you go.

Tommy.

I'm 83 trapped in the body of a 43-year-old.

(all laughing) - Yep.

I got news for you.

I knew you when you were 43 and you looked 83.

Yeah, - We've done a lot of great things over the years.

A lot of fun things.

My god, we've went a lot of places, saw a lot of people make fools of ourself a lot of different places.

(all laughing) Yeah, we caught a lot of fish over the years, frankly.

(birds chirping) - You guys ready?

(boat motor groans) Looks like Jack's got one.

- First year I caught the biggest fish, which, you know, everybody's happy.

- Sure, - Happy, happy, - We were all happy.

- Happy as hell farmers.

- First guy comes in, gets ready.

- Second year, not quite as happy when I caught the biggest fish.

Third year they took a vote if I was coming back, but they all voted them come back.

It's been great.

It's a great bunch of guys - [Bret] While looking back on the memories of trips to the past and the lodge is fun.

We were able to go out in the water and create some new ones as well.

- Say one of us is gonna get bit, we just pulled through a few.

(water sloshing) [Denny] That was a good eater.

- That was a good eater.

Nice.

You guys can, we can have our fish fry tomorrow.

- [Bret] There's a fish down there.

(upbeat melodic song) This right there.

We were trolling spinners with bottom bouncers, and I was showing Denny how the live scope worked when I spotted a nice fish.

Decent Fish.

♪ Life is good ♪ ♪ Life is good, yes ♪ - Here it comes.

♪ Life is good ♪ ♪ Life is good, yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah, in my darkest times ♪ ♪ You've got me feeling like ♪ ♪ I've been walking on air ♪ ♪ Left all my worries and cares ♪ ♪ I've got no burdens around you ♪ ♪ I don't care who knows I love you ♪ ♪ 'cuz I've been so lost without you ♪ Oh, it's, oh yeah, it's nice.

It's wrapped on my live scope.

That's a big fish.

- Oh, yep.

Wrapped in the, wrapped in the live scope cable.

Thank you, Dan.

Nice.

Nice save.

- That's a beauty right there.

30 inch wildlife fins are a little bit beat up.

Heck yeah.

- [Bret] We weren't the only ones having success.

And when you're dealing with this group, you know there's gonna be some shenanigans.

- It was good.

I was leading in the clubhouse until they took Jansen out fishing this afternoon.

That was my first mistake.

- You took me out, it's my boat.

I got another one.

All right.

So we crank it up, eh, nice fish.

Really?

A nice fish.

20, 27 and a half, half, - 20.

It's 27.

The half, I don't know where the half came from, Ron.

Anyway, it's the winner so far.

All right, so Jansen throws his plug back in the lake.

All right.

- Yeah.

We unhooked the, - We unhooked the fish.

He lets the fish go, he throws it back in the lake and, and we sit down.

He says, I got another one.

- [Bret] Any one?

- I, I don't know.

We don't know.

So he cranks it in.

We, we take the fish out of the lake.

It's 27, so now we're arguing, - Where were you?

- Huh?

- He hooked it back on his line.

- Oh no, no.

Literally we threw it back, back in the lake.

So now we're arguing about did he catch two 27 fish or did he catch the same fish twice.

He did have two 27 inch fish walleyes.

- That's correct.

- On the, - That's pretty amazing.

- On the line.

You netted two 27.

- I netted two 27 inch walleyes.

- There you go.

- And you're the leader in the clubhouse.

- Case closed.

- What can I, what can I say?

- Yeah.

- [Bret] Do you have pictures of the two?

Did he let you take pictures?

- We didn't take a picture of the 27.

That's the one thing about Jansen on this trip.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- Tell me about it.

- I catch a 26 and a half fish the other day.

Yeah, well let's take a picture.

Poof can't leave it out of the boat that long.

It's gonna die.

- The water.

Yeah.

- You know, - I'm more concerned about the fish, - Yeah, yeah.

- than the picture.

- Yeah, right.

(gospel like music) - [Bret] While this list may show their real names, it's not what they're usually called on the strip.

- I have no idea where my name came from.

You guys gave it to me.

- Jansen, - What's your nickname?

- Hog.

Hog Nuts.

- Speak up sweetie.

What was that?

- [Bret] Speak up please.

(all laughing) - Hog hog nuts.

Hog nuts.

- Oh, okay.

They couldn't, they couldn't pronounce my name so they ended up hog nuts.

They ended up with hog nuts.

But I got back at them.

- Because he's crazy.

- No, no, no, no.

- Then you gotta tell the dump story how he nicknamed you Dumpy.

- Oh yeah.

Everybody had their own nickname and Ron.

Yeah, that's a good one.

Ron.

Ron happened to be nicknamed Roadkill.

He was just having a few cocktails fell off the dock, landed in the boat and his feet and hands were up like this.

He looked a little like roadkill.

(laughing) So that's, that's how that one stuck.

- That is not the way it happened.

- It is, yeah.

That's exactly how it happened.

- First of all, I thought somebody was saying, - How would you know?

- Ron are you, are you okay?

And all I hear is Dale Johnson saying, looks like roadkill.

(all laughing) - What we call Denny Dumpy.

And why is that Denny?

- Well I got the nickname Dumpy because Don Peterson and I went every night to the dump.

It started out that we went looking for trailer hitch balls.

(all laughing) and we found plenty of them, but we couldn't get 'em off.

- It's a blur.

(background music) - I am the youngest of this whole group and they were cordial enough to ask me four years ago to come along.

And I think the reason is because they keep falling down and I gotta pick 'em up.

(all laughing) - I mean, that's true.

- Honest to God's truth, if they're not falling in the water they're falling on the floor.

Granted I'm 64 and they're getting heavier too.

(all laughing) So they're a great bunch of guys to fish with.

They a lot of knowledge on fishing.

They don't catch a lot of fish sometimes, but they got a hell of a lot of knowledge.

(background upbeat song) - [Bret] Over the years, a few of the original members have dropped out of the annual trip.

Despite that, this tradition has continued.

You could say it's because of the camaraderie, the good natured jokes and nicknames and of course the fishing.

But as the group gets older, what does the future hold for the Walleye Whackers?

- Well, I don't know.

It gets harder for all of us to get in the boat out of the boat and all good things come to an end and we'll see.

- Yeah.

Take good memories away.

- Yeah, that's right.

We might quit while we're ahead.

- I think we're, you've heard a little bit too to talk about we're probably aging out a little bit.

I've told people I know I'm in the fourth quarter, but I'm betting on triple overtime.

- You know, I can't imagine that in this whole discussion we've had here, - Yeah.

That I had anything to say.

- That no one has said that the location of the trip always had to be within eight miles of a casino.

- Those, those sometimes aren't the best memory.

The best memories are right here with the, with the fishing.

- I know it's coming to an end one of these years.

I would trust my life with any one of them.

That's how, I think, close we've gotten.

Well maybe, maybe not.

Ron - I, I love these guys.

- And I trust them with my car.

I trust them with my life.

(all laughing) (upbeat music ends) (upbeat new age music) - They're tiny, highly carnivorous predatory zooplankton.

They're, you know, a really devastating invasive species and not that many people know about them.

Spiny water fleas are an invasive zooplankton that have been in Minnesota since at least the 1990s, in terms of our inland lakes.

It, it is from Europe and Eurasia.

It came in on the Great Lakes shipping industry through the channels and got to our harbor in Lake Superior and has spread inland since.

And they're really disruptive to aquatic food webs because they eat a lot of the native zooplankton that are really important for baby perch and walleye.

But then on the other hand, spiny water fleas are almost basically inedible for other small fish because they have a long barbed tail spine.

So it's high energetic cost for a fish to eat that, even if they can fit it into their mouth.

One study looked at how zebra mussels and spiny water flea were affecting yellow perch and walleye in what we know as Minnesota's nine large walleye lakes Mille Lacs Kabetogama, Rainy, the the big popular walleye lakes.

And they looked at the food webs of those lakes and they also had 35 years of Minnesota DNR fall staining surveys.

What they found was that in lakes that had zebra mussels and spiny water flea, walleye growth was 25% smaller going into their first winter.

So that's because these baby fish in their first year, they are mostly eating zooplankton and they can't eat spiny water fleas.

The family of native plankton that eats a lot of phytoplankton is they're called Daphnia.

And those are really important parts of a lot of our upper Midwest aquatic food webs because they are grazers, they are eating all the algae that keep our, keeps our lake in balance and slows down those algae blooms.

I do really appreciate being out on a lake with a healthy ecosystem and seeing the fish that are present and knowing that spiny water fleas dramatically destabilize that and can lead to major algae blooms is just kind of scary.

Spiny Water flea only actually lives one season, but they form these resting eggs that can, they drop down into the sediment when the water starts to get cold, and we're going into winter, and those eggs will typically hatch out the next spring or summer.

Or if conditions are unfavorable, they'll just stay in the sediment up to three to five years and they'll hatch out when conditions are good.

They have explosive reproductive rates so they can, we're talking about exponential growth, so very high impact species.

The even scarier thing is that there are no control options at this point and not even really anything in the research pipeline.

So the only thing we can do is prevent further spread and try to get a better handle on where they currently are.

We have a protocol that's available on our website that anybody can download, teaches people how to do the sampling.

This is our basic setup.

If, if you're interested in doing spiny water flea surveillance monitoring.

The most important thing and the most specialized tool is this plankton net.

And this is used to do what we call a vertical plankton tow.

And you get on your boat or canoe, you wanna find the deepest part of the lake.

This has some weights at the bottom to keep it vertical in the water column.

And you just lower this all the way to the bottom and slowly pull it back up.

And so what this is doing is taking in this big volume of water, you're dragging it through and you're getting a little snapshot of the tiny organisms that live in the water column.

You pull it up, you shake it out, and then all the little critters are gonna be either at this collection cup or along the side.

And then you can open up your little drain hole here.

And then what we do is we just rinse it down with water from the lake.

And so this is just drawing all the critters that are caught up on the walls down into the bottom until this is fully dry.

Then you're basically just going through your sample to see if you caught anything.

Spiny water fleas are gonna be pretty visible.

That's, that's one of the things that makes this surveillance approach very achievable for volunteers is you don't need specialized equipment, you don't need a microscope, you don't have to send your sample to a lab.

If you do find spiny water fleas, take pictures with your smartphone and also save some samples in a jar in isopropyl alcohol and get those to your local D-N-R-A-I-S specialist.

(slightly ominous jumpy music) They have been found in 23 lakes.

There was one new detection found last summer, but other than that we had no new discoveries in infestation since 2016.

What we suspect, based on some other research projects that shows that spiny water fleas have a really low detectability, like they can be kind of occurring in the background or evading traditional monitoring methods for a long time.

So we think that they are probably in a lot more lakes.

We have connected water bodies where a population hasn't been documented, but it's downstream from a confirmed infestation.

So the DNR considers it infested.

There are currently 67 listed infested water bodies in Minnesota.

They live and reproduce in lakes.

They can be in larger rivers.

I believe that they are in the Rainy River.

They don't really live and reside in a creek.

There are a number of infested lakes in the Arrowhead region and they're really in some of the most popular northern Minnesota fishing lakes.

Some of those really high profile lakes that are very popular for fishing.

And that kind of makes it even scarier because we have a lot of people coming and going from those lakes to fish.

And our research shows that spiny water fleas spread on fishing gear, stopping the spread is actually pretty easy.

It's just a matter of, you know, following that clean drain dry mantra.

And with spiny water flea, dry is the really key element because they do desiccate and die quickly.

And so we tell people you wanna like leave your fishing gear out and for out in the sun for at least a day before you're moving and then wiping down your monofilament.

The fishing pole eyelets is really important 'cause as you are dragging your line through the water, either reeling it in or particularly if you're using a down rigger, spiny water fleas will, they'll catch their tail spine on the fishing line and then more and more sort of catch on each other.

What that will look like is you'll just see sort of this weird gelatinous glob.

You know, it might look like any other sort of lake goop that you get on your fishing line.

But if you look closely this, it could be spiny water flea, you should be brushing that off or wiping it off with a towel.

And the other thing is really making sure all your residual water is cleaned out with hot water or fully dried.

So things like bait buckets, bilges, live wells, those are high risk areas 'cause spiny water fleas could survive in a very small amount of residual water.

If you go to a lake and if you know that spiny water fleas are there, hopefully you know we can improve the signage.

We can inform the boat inspectors and and remind people that cleaning their fishing gear is really important at this site.

We have chemicals that can kill zooplankton.

The problem is we don't have any chemicals that are spiny water flea specific.

So a chemical treatment using the available formulations would kill all the zooplankton, which is sort of a non-starter.

In really dense situations, you could have up to a hundred spiny water fleas in a cubic meter of water and you know, methods that would hypothetically be developed that could capture them.

The problem is making that species specific.

You would risk, you know, filtering out or sucking up so many native phytoplankton and zooplankton that you could do potentially a lot more harm than good.

It's a big challenge.

I could see potential genetic methods sometime long into the future being an option, but, but we haven't even done any genome work on spiny water fleas, so it's a ways out.

I think we should have some hope that research advances might give us some solutions to control them just 'cause we don't have anything in our back pocket right now, you know, doesn't mean that limiting the spread right now isn't super important.

I mean that's, that's always priority number one is to prevent future spread - [Narrator] Stories about research into invasive aquatic algae plants and animals are sponsored in part by The Aquatic Invasive Species Task Forces of Wright, Meeker, Yellow Medicine, Lac Qui Parle, Swift, and Big Stone counties.

We can stop aquatic hitchhikers from infesting more lakes and streams by cleaning up everything we pull out of the water.

It's a simple drill, clean in, clean out.

Before leaving a water access, clean your boat and water equipment, remove and dispose of all plants and aquatic species in the trash.

Drain water from your boat, ballast tanks, motor, live well and bait container.

Remove drain plugs and keep drain plugs out while transporting equipment.

Dispose of unwanted bait in the trash.

To keep live bait, drain the water and refill the bait container with bottled or tap water.

And if you have been in infested waters, also spray your boat with high pressure water, rinse with very hot water, dry for at least five days.

Stop the spread of AIS.

(upbeat new age music) 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, Mark and Margaret Yeakel Jolene, on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org and by West Central Initiative, and Western Minnesota Prairie Waters, and the members of Pioneer PBS.