Game and Fish plans walleye-tagging study on Coe Lake in Eddy County
Apr. 4—The North Dakota Game and Fish Department is planning a walleye-tagging study this summer on Coe Lake in Eddy County in an effort to learn more about the population size, the percentage of fish that are kept by anglers and the total annual harvest.
In a recent "North Dakota Outdoors" webcast, Bryan Sea, Northeast Fisheries District supervisor for the North Dakota Game and Fish Department in Devils Lake, said the tagging study is part of a statewide effort to gain information on the
new prairie lakes that have appeared across the state
since the onset of a wet cycle that began in the early '90s.
North Dakota today has some 450 fishable waters, compared with 250 a couple of decades ago, resulting in walleye fishing opportunities that have never been better.
As part of the tagging study, Game and Fish crews will set trap nets or frame nets this spring to catch walleyes and insert a metal jaw tag on each fish, Sea said. Crews also will collect information on the length, weight and sex of the walleyes before releasing them.
The goal is to tag about 500 walleyes, Sea told the Herald.
"We'll come back later in the summer during our standard adult population netting to do a recapture event to get an estimate on the population size," he said.
They get that estimate by comparing the ratio of tagged to untagged fish during the recapture effort.
The tagging study also will help determine whether harvest regulations are adequate to sustain quality fishing on Coe Lake over the long term, Sea said.
"I believe they are, but it will be interesting to see how things are going there," he said.
Located 10 miles south of Warwick, North Dakota — or about 35 miles south of Devils Lake — Coe Lake covers 1,213.6 acres, with an average depth of 11 feet and a maximum depth of 16.5 feet.
Based on previous Game and Fish netting assessments,
Coe has a "good number" of walleyes, with several size-classes available. The lake also has an abundance of perch, surveys show, with most of those fish less than 7 inches.
Anglers fishing Coe this spring and summer can expect plenty of "keeper-size" walleyes, Sea said, the 15- to 20-inch fish "that people really like to catch."
Game and Fish has stocked Coe with walleye fingerlings annually since 2015, including the most recent stocking of 50,400 fingerlings in 2023.
A concrete boat ramp is available on the north side of the lake off Eddy County Road 8.
A similar walleye-tagging study is in the works
on 3,300-acre West Lake Napoleon in Logan County, said Paul Bailey, south-central fisheries supervisor for Game and Fish in Bismarck. Based on a 2023 assessment, West Lake Napoleon has an abundance of walleyes in the 13- to 24-inch range with an average size of 17.9 inches, despite a partial winterkill in the winter of 2022-23. Walleyes made up nearly 78% of the sampling effort on West Lake Napoleon, followed by perch at 13.1% and northern pike at 9.3%.
Located 1 mile west of Napoleon, North Dakota, West Lake Napoleon has a concrete boat ramp in the northeast corner of the lake.
