Rock Lake Structures

Community fisheries in Wyoming vary from a small lake in a town, to a small lake just outside of town. Some of those lakes have shoreline habitat that serves a dual purpose where smaller fish can stay out of sight of bigger fish, but where bigger fish can also find them there. Without that type of habitat, a fishery can get out of balance; instead of a mix of small, medium, and large fish, a population of fish can skew toward one size—usually larger numbers of small fish and fewer large fish. That was the case at Rock Lake outside of Wheatland, where anglers catch black crappie, catfish, yellow perch and some walleye, but its largemouth bass population was the species that are out of balance. Wyoming Game and Fish Department Laramie Region Aquatic Habitat Biologist Steve Gale said:

"...what we found was that the lake didn’t have much habitat. When the lake is full, there’s some shoreline habitat, but as the lake goes down—it’s an irrigation reservoir, so it kind annually goes down each year—there’s just not a lot of complex habitat in the lake for fish, for small fish to hide or for big fish to find those small fish."

A first-of-its-kind project in Wyoming came together with a partnership between the Reservoir Fish Habitat Partnership and the Wyldlife Fund. The Wyldlife Fund helped manage grant funding from Bass Pro Shops and the Game and Fish’s Habitat Trust Fund to pay for 200 artificial fish habitat structures "safe havens" —compact structures with lots of artificial limbs and tree trunks that provide cover for smaller fish—and "trophy trees," with less limbs that give bigger fish a place to forage.

"Usually, once you put habitat structures in a lake, fish find them pretty fast. We don’t stock largemouth bass in here, but we do stock some black crappie and we do stock catfish occasionally. What we’re hoping to see over the next 3-4 years is that the small fish are finding these safe havens, the larger predatory fish are finding the trophy trees, and they’re having more interactions. The diets of the largemouth bass switch from insects to fish, we get better growth rates, and we’re hopefully going to have more largemouth bass that will be a little bit bigger here."

High School students from Wheatland High School assembled most of the structures and helped deploy some of the structures—all part of a class where they learned about the importance of fish habitat and the reason for the project. The Wheatland Irrigation District gave its approval for the project as well. Anglers with boats will be apprised of the locations of the structures in the lake. Biologists will come in periodically to sample the lakes to see the results of placing the structures.