In 1950, the DNR turned to Shoepack Lake, a small isolated water containing abundant muskies located in the Hudson Bay drainage in far northern Minnesota.
After years of stocking with Shoepack progeny, a pattern began to emerge.
During the 1980s, Minnesota DNR fishery research scientists Jerry Younk and Robert Strand evaluated the performance of four strains of muskies, including Shoepack, in two Minnesota lakes.
Shoepack muskies were last stocked in Minnesota in the early 1980s, but biologists are questioning whether their genetic legacy still affects the size potential in waters where they were stocked.
Moose Lake is a native muskie water, but was stocked 11 times from 1965 to 1983 with Shoepack strain fish, and once more in 1985 with Wisconsin strain muskies," he says.
Glacial activity 10000-12000 yr BP created three large lakes surrounding the peninsula; Rainy Lake to the north, Namakan Lake to the east, and Kabetogama Lake to the south, Numerous drainages located along the southern edge of the Kabetogama Peninsula enter into Kabetogama Lake, ranging from Locator and Sucker Creek in the far northwest to Shoepack and East Shoepack in the southeast (Schlosser et al.
1A) but differed only from the East Shoepack drainage (Tukey's multiple comparison, P [less than] 0.05).
Locator and East Shoepack are both relatively small drainages, with primarily upland ponds, located at the extreme ends of the peninsula.
Five drainages along the southern portion of the Kabetogama peninsula, spanning [approximately]18 km of shoreline distance, were sampled during the study, including Locator, Sucker Creek, Lost Ponds, Shoepack, and East Shoepack [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED].
Phoxinus eos-neogaeus gynogens from three drainages - Sucker Creek, Lost Ponds, and Shoepack - were assayed for clonal identity and variation using multi-locus, "in gel" DNA fingerprinting.
Fish used in the analysis of morphological relationships were collected in 1994 during the normal spring sampling of the four sites of the Lost Ponds drainage and an additional upland pond site in the East Shoepack drainage.
In addition, discriminant function analysis (DFA) was used to determine if differences in ecologically relevant morphological characters occurred between populations in the upland pond of the Lost Ponds and East Shoepack drainages in response to disproportionate frequencies of hybrid gynogens in the two drainages.