Tag Archives: Michigan Department of Conservation’s Fish Division

The story of how salmon got to the Great Lakes, told by the man who made it happen

Close to 10 million chinook and coho salmon swim in Lake Michigan, Lake Huron and Lake Superior. There were none when Howard Tanner started as the chief of the Michigan Department of Conservation’s Fish Division in 1964. His boss, Ralph MacMullan, spent much of their first meeting lambasting the fish department for its previous lack of action and dysfunction. Heaps of dead fish were washing up on beaches, the lakes were overly commercially fished and there was little recreational fishing to speak of. He gave Tanner a mandate: “Do something. “And if you can,” he added, “make it spectacular.” By introducing salmon into the Great Lakes in the 1960s, Tanner did just that. >click to read<12:26