Saginaw, Tittabawassee walleye OK to eat

Wednesday, August 31, 2005 By Jeff Kart Bay City Times Writer

 A new Michigan fishing advisory includes some sizzling good news for area anglers - in most cases, they can eat all the walleye they want.

The state Department of Community Health has removed most advisories for eating walleye from the Saginaw and Tittabawassee rivers, due to testing that shows dioxin levels in larger walleye aren't above state limits.

Under the soon-to-be released guidelines, people from the general population, except for women of child-bearing age and children under 15, can eat all the walleye they want from the two rivers, as long as the fish are under 22 inches long. The legal limit to keep walleye is 15 inches.

That doesn't mean the rivers have gotten any cleaner since the last advisories were issued, in 2004.

It means that more testing by the state has shown that dioxin in the watershed is not being absorbed into the tissue of walleye as much as was previously thought, said Kory J. Groetsch, a toxicologist for the state health department.

Still, the change is significant, said Michael T. Kelly, a walleye fisherman who administers the Saginaw Bay Watershed Initiative Network, with offices in downtown Bay City.

"Anything that promotes consumption of the area's No. 1 game fish is a positive thing," Kelly said.

He said he thinks the change will remove some of the stigma associated with local rivers, and encourage more people to eat walleye, which is a healthy food.

For years, state health advisories for walleye from the Saginaw and Tittabawassee rivers have been one meal a week for the general population and one meal a month for women and children.

But those warnings were based on testing of walleye under 16 inches, and walleye were lumped in with other fish based on testing of other, larger species.
In recent years, the state Department of Environmental Quality has tested walleye from 16 to 21 inches, and found that dioxin levels, from sources such as Dow Chemical Co. operations, weren't high enough to trigger an advisory.

The threshold, based on a state formula, is 10 parts per trillion, and none of the larger walleye had levels above 6 ppt, Groetsch said.

"It seems most likely that because they're migratory, they don't spend as much time feeding in the Tittabawassee River," he explained, because walleye move between the two local rivers and the Saginaw Bay.

Walleye still are under an advisory for women and children due to levels of polychlorinated biphenyls - or PCBs - which are chemicals left behind by old industrial processes in the watershed.

Women and children still are advised to eat no more than one meal a month of walleye under 22 inches, and no more than six meals a year over 22 inches.

Under the new advisory, the general population is advised to eat no more than one meal a week of walleye over 22 inches.

"The question of, 'Is the chemical content out there in the fish going down or up?' We don't know," Groetsch said.

"... There hasn't been any sort of change as far as it's getting cleaner or anything like that. It's just that we have better data, more data, to be able to give better advice."

The 2005 advisory will likely be released in a few weeks, and be available online at michigan.gov/mdch-toxics. The state no longer prints copies due to budget constraints.

- Jeff Kart covers the environment and politics for The Times. He can be reached at 894-9639 or by e-mail at jkart@bc-times.com.

 

For additional articles like this one, go to the Tittabawassee River Watch web site www.trwnews.net for complete coverage of the Tittabawassee River Dow Chemical dioxin contamination saga. . The Newspaper / Media page of our site contains an extensive archive of media articles dating back to January 2002. The source organization's web site link is listed to the right of the article, visit often for other news in our area. The Newspaper / Media page may be accessed by scrolling down to the bottom of the CONTENTS section and clicking on the Newspaper/Media link.