By Craig Springer
It’s a peculiar name for a fish: Muskellunge. And odd as it is, the origin of the word is not murky. French trappers and Jesuit priests were likely the first Europeans in the Great Lakes region to give the fish a written name. And it is quite descriptive: masque allonge, an elongated mask. It refers to the duck-billed snout.
A fish that can grow the size of an NBA forward’s leg can concentrate one’s thoughts, especially if you are tossing hefty lures. Form follows function. A big muskie is a torpedo wrapped in scales, built for bursts of speed, tail to lip, with a bony jaw studded with teeth for eating meat—hapless muskrats, ducklings, suckers, and shiners. Hooking up with one creates a lasting memory for any angler.
Muskie are commonly thought of as a fish of the North, the Great Lakes states, reservoirs and mid to large streams in the Ohio and upper Mississippi river basins. And North Carolina, well not so much—unless you live and fish there.
Muskellunge naturally occur in far western North Carolina in the French Broad River watershed that flows into the Tennessee River system. Muskie do not occur too much further south and not at all to the east. The French Broad River is on the fringe, you might say. But that should not be taken for any less concern for the fishery and its importance.
The stream had a history of turning up big muskie, making news in local papers from the 1880s and on—until about 1970. Productivity dropped off in the French Broad River; the muskie population became reliant on stocking from North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission’s (NCWRC) Table Rock State Fish Hatchery and has remained so ever since.
Research fish biologists with the NCWRC are endeavoring to improve the lot of muskie occupying a lengthy reach of the French Broad River. To do so, they rely on Sport Fish Restoration dollars, money derived from federal excise taxes paid by fishing tackle manufacturers as well as a tax on motorboat fuel. Fishing license sales help pay the way, too. Those combined dollars pay for the production and stocking of hatchery-reared muskie. They pay for the technology such as electrofishing gear, nets, tagging and detection systems, vehicles and salaries to research and manage a muskie fishery important to North Carolinians.
To learn more about the status and plight of French Broad muskellunge, NCWRC biologists conducted the first of its kind habitat restoration project near the mouth of Mud Creek and an oxbow floodplain called Pleasant Grove.
The creek name might be a sort of give-away here. Muskie are among the first fish species to spawn come spring. They have an affinity for slow-flowing oxbow backwaters and weedy shallows—like what might find in a ‘mud creek’ slough. Muskie broadcast their fertilized eggs over aquatic vegetation that are left to incubate without parental care. The decline in a natural-reproducing muskie population in the French Broad coincided with the loss of that very habitat. An entrenched main river channel essentially separated from the adjacent lowland flood plains from the main river, making former spawning and nursery habitats inaccessible. The Pleasant Grove and Mud Creek habitat rehab work seeks to recreate what has been lost, and what is needed for a robust muskie population and ultimately, improved angling.
Young muskie at the hatchery starting in 2018 received Passive Integrated Transponders, or PIT tags, each as thick as a pencil lead, essentially giving every fish a unique identifier. The technology is akin to a veterinarian putting a microchip into the nape of your pet dog. Information from the tags was collected by solar-powered antennae and data-loggers laid along the slough bottom at strategic sites. As the tagged muskie swam about, their movements over the antenna were logged and recorded. The amount of data recorded was quite large—more than 20,000 detections over the span of 5 years—allowing the researchers a “peek behind the curtain” to better understand how these river muskie make a living. To be clear, individual fish crossed over the antennae multiple times over the years.
Annual population assessments of muskie collected with the use of electrofishing boats will allow scientists to better understand age and growth and condition of the fish. The surveys were conducted from 2019 to 2024. The scientists are just now analyzing a mountain of data derived from their work and expect to report out their conclusions in the coming months. Those findings will help the NCWRC determine future actions such as seasons, harvest restrictions, as well as potentially steer future habitat restoration projects in this unique and storied muskie fishery. Their findings may be useful to other fisheries professionals who seek to improve habitats and angling for these scaled torpedoes elsewhere.