Out of Shiners Again

Every ice season has that moment. You walk into the bait shop at 5:40 a.m., stomp the snow off, point at the shiner tank like you’re ordering at a steakhouse, and the kid behind the counter gives you the look. The sorry-buddy look. There’s a handwritten sign on the tank and it says what you were afraid it’d say.

Turns out that’s not just bad luck at your shop. It’s math.

The short version

According to Great Lakes Echo, Minnesota comes up about 10,000 gallons of golden shiners short every year. That’s roughly 80,000 pounds of minnows. And we can’t just truck more in, because Minnesota doesn’t allow live baitfish to be imported. That rule is there to keep invasive species and fish diseases out, which is a good rule. It just means the bait has to come from here.

Minnesota Sea Grant says about 70% of anglers use baitfish. Shiners are a big favorite with ice anglers, and that’s exactly when they get scarce. Producers catch them in the fall and hold them for winter, when everybody shows up at once wanting a scoop.

It isn’t just us, either. The state also uses baitfish to raise the game fish it stocks. So the walleye fry you’re hoping grow up in your lake are standing in the same line you are.

The game-fish guy who said “I don’t know bait”

Don Schreiner is a Minnesota Sea Grant fisheries specialist who spent 25 years managing Minnesota’s piece of Lake Superior for the DNR. Big water, big fish. When the bait project came up, he told Great Lakes Echo his first reaction was basically, “I don’t know anything about growing bait fish. I manage game fish.”

So he spent about a year reading up on fish farming and talking to bait people before deciding it could work. Honestly, that’s more homework than I’ve ever done for anything, including the time I bought a used ice house off a guy based on one blurry photo.

From 2022 through 2024, Sea Grant teamed up with the DNR, Central Lakes College in Brainerd and bait producers. That’s four groups that don’t normally raise the same kind of fish. They tried four ways of growing shiners:

indoor tanks that keep recycling the same water
aquaponics, which raises fish and plants together
outdoor ponds and pond-side tanks stocked with young fish
outdoor ponds and tanks stocked with fish already trained to eat fish food from a bag

They were up front that it was a demonstration, not a head-to-head contest, so nobody can say which way makes the most money. But all four produced shiners big enough to sell, every year. In the indoor tanks, most fish hit bait size in six or seven months. Aquaponics took about nine. Some outdoor ponds got there in five or six.

“I expected some of these strategies to fail,” Schreiner said. None did.

The bait man in the greenhouse

Barry Thoele has worked in Minnesota’s wholesale bait business for about 35 years. He went looking for gaps in the bait market and noticed hardly anybody was working on the shiner problem. He told Great Lakes Echo the shortage got a lot more obvious once illegal imports got shut down.

“The future of golden shiners in Minnesota is not going to look like the past of golden shiners in Minnesota,” he said.

Here’s what they’re up against, according to the two of them:

Our summers are short. Wild shiners can take about two years to reach the 2.5- to 4-inch size you buy. They spawn late in summer, so the babies only get a few good months before winter shuts things down.
The ponds are changing hands. “Everybody wants to live on water,” Schreiner said. A pond that used to belong to one farm can get split up between several owners. Wetlands also get used for housing, ducks and fish stocking.
The weather won’t sit still. Drought can drop water levels enough to kill fish in summer or winter. A big rain can connect ponds that used to be separate and let other fish move in.
A parasite. Thoele said one ovarian parasite can sterilize female shiners by about age 2 in some Minnesota populations.

So Thoele has been trying high tunnels, the same hoop-house greenhouses vegetable growers use to stretch their season, to see if he can warm ponds and give shiners a longer summer. That’s right. Somewhere in Minnesota there’s a minnow getting the tomato treatment. I can’t even keep a basil plant alive on the windowsill.

Schreiner’s other idea is hatching shiner fry indoors so they can go outside in late April or May instead of waiting on Mother Nature’s late-summer spawn. That’s months of extra growing before the lakes lock up.

Lots of little bait farms

Neither man is dreaming about one giant minnow factory. Schreiner wants more small producers, like farmers with an empty building or an unused pond. He said several facilities could be turned into fish operations, including some sitting unused, and he’d rather see lots of little operations than a few big ones.

“If one business has a failure, there’s someone there to pick up the flag,” Thoele said.

Sea Grant has published a guide for current and future fish farmers. It’s still working on what to feed the babies and how many fish to put in each pond. A workshop on the project is tentatively planned for late winter or early spring 2027.

The part that sticks

Nobody puts a golden shiner on a postcard. It’s the little silver guy down in the bucket that does all the work while the walleye gets its picture taken. But a whole lot of Minnesota winters run on that little guy, and on the people up early in the cold keeping the tanks full for the rest of us.

So next time the kid at the counter gives you the sorry-buddy look, be nice to him. He doesn’t make the minnows. And somebody out there is in a greenhouse trying to.

Sources

Source 1 → Source 2 →

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