Charles Bronte, Green Bay Fishery Resources Office Fishery Biologist, arranged and coordinated the fist meeting of an Implementation Task Group of the salmon and trout mass marking initiative of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. 

Bronte was invited as the US co-chairperson of the group, along with Marian Daniels of the Ontario Ministry of Natural resources who is the Canadian co-chair, to lead a interagency team of federal, state, tribal and provincial biologists tasked with developing a plan to finclip and/or coded wire tag all salmon and trout stocked into the Great Lakes. 

The initiative is being spearheaded by the Council of Lake Committees of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission and is modeled after a similar program that has been underway in the Pacific northwest for decades. 

This program, if realized, will bring a wealth of new data on the performance and fate of stocked salmon and trout in the Great Lakes and generate an unparalleled level of cooperation among all management agencies under the umbrella of the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission.

A two-day meeting was held in Windsor during December 12-13 to begin the development of the equipment and manpower needs for mass marking/tagging the 30 million trout and salmon stocked annually in the Great Lakes.  The tasked group will concentrate on an initial demonstration project to tag all Chinook salmon and lake trout stocked into lakes Michigan and Huron in an effort to develop an unbiased estimate of Chinook salmon natural reproduction and to better tract the performance of lake trout for the restoration effort in those lakes. 

A funding task group will simultaneously pursue efforts to fund the program that will involve an initial start up cost of around $ 7 million and an annual operations budget of $3 million. 

The Council of Lake Committees has endorsed the idea of the making the Region 3 Fisheries Program the center of a New Salmon Mass Marking Laboratory that will be responsible for all tagging, database management, tag extraction functions and support experimental design and data analysis activities, as well as coordinate data recovery operations for the entire Great Lakes Basin. 

The lab will work closely with all management agencies to develop timely results that have lake-wide and basin wide implications for fisheries management.