Joel Petersen has $3,200 worth of trap nets spread across his garage floor in Muskegon. They need repair before next season. The webbing is torn, the leads are frayed, and he's standing there with his phone calculator open, running the same math he's been running for three years: repair cost versus expected catch, multiplied by the price per pound, minus fuel and labor and dock fees and the property taxes he mentioned twice in our first conversation.
The number never works. It hasn't worked for three years. But standing here in November with spring six months away, he still hasn't decided whether to fix them.
He's 45, fourth generation, and his family has fished Lake Michigan for whitefish since before his grandfather was born. This season he pulled nets that can hold thousands of fish and counted twelve. "You can't even pay the property taxes on the dock," he told me. So he takes welding jobs now, enough to cover what the lake doesn't give anymore. Whether he's a welder who fishes or a fisherman who welds—the nets on the floor are forcing an answer.
Whitefish harvests have dropped 70% since 2009. Most fish he catches are in their mid-20s, near the end of their 30-year lifespan. Reproduction has been abysmal since the early 2000s. Joel knows the spawning temperature ranges by heart now—he's read enough MDNR reports to see the pattern in the data before the scientists write their conclusions. He knows what the numbers mean. In ten years there won't be anybody left fishing.
But the real timeline isn't ten years. It's however long his 73-year-old father Alan wants to keep going out.
The deck of the Joy—the boat Joel operates in Leland under agreement with a preservation nonprofit—is covered in invasive quagga mussels. They're everywhere on the lake bottom now, filtering the water so clear you can see 30 feet down in places that used to be murky with life. The mussels ate the zooplankton that baby whitefish need to survive. Lake trout now make up 95% of what comes up in his nets. He has to throw them back. He's only licensed for whitefish.
Every time he goes out, he's catching fish that aren't there to catch and throwing back fish he can't sell.
"We've literally watched a population grow old and disappear in front of our eyes. I can't imagine any way we can change the ecosystem in the amount of time that we have left."
Jason Smith, a Great Lakes biologist with the Bay Mills Indian Community, told a reporter last year. Joel thinks about that second sentence every time he looks at his nets.
The scientists are trying anyway. They're collecting eggs from the few remaining whitefish and planting them in rivers, hoping the fish will spawn there instead of on the mussel-covered lake bottom. This year they managed to plant 25,000 eggs—a fraction of what they planted the year before, because there aren't enough whitefish left to collect from. The experiment won't show results for years. Efforts to suppress the quagga mussels themselves are "years to decades away," the researchers say.
Scientists measure in decades. Regulators respond in seasons. Joel needs to decide by spring. His dad's timeline is however many more years his body holds up. The whitefish that are left have maybe five to ten years.
In 2025, state and tribal managers set the most conservative harvest limits on record —slashing catches 94% in central Lake Michigan to 10,000 pounds from 170,200 the year before. The cuts are based on population surveys that confirm what his nets already tell him. Knowing why the quota dropped doesn't help him decide whether to repair equipment built to last decades when the fish might not.
His cousin Eric works the boat with him and his dad. His uncle Bill still fishes too.
Bill told an interviewer they'll keep going because the next generation is "already into it. It's too late to start looking for another job." Only 13 commercial fishing businesses operated in Michigan waters in 2020, down from thousands historically.
Joel's welding work is steady. He's good at it. The jobs pay better than fishing did even in good years. He could get more certified, take on bigger projects, maybe stop thinking about those nets. But his dad is 73 and still goes out. When Alan decides he's done, that's probably when the Petersen family operation ends. Four generations, 90 years, finished not because anyone chose to quit but because the lake changed too fast —deep waters warming, winter ice cover down 71% since the 1970s, an ecosystem transformed in less than two decades.
The Fishtown Preservation Society owns the Joy and subsidizes Joel's operation in Leland, committed to keeping an active fishing presence on the historic docks even as the fish disappear. Amanda Holmes, who runs the society, calls whitefish "an identity in Michigan" and sees their continued support as an act of hope. "Whitefish have bounced back before," she reasons.
Joel needs to decide about the nets before spring. The quagga mussels might peak and decline. The river spawning experiments might work. The warming waters might stabilize. All of this could happen. Just probably not in the lifespan of the fish currently in the lake, and definitely not in the timeline of a fourth-generation fisher standing in his garage with a calculator.
He'll probably fix them. Not because he thinks the science will turn around in time, or because his welding income makes it affordable, or even because his dad needs him to. He'll fix them because the alternative is deciding it's over, and he's not ready to be the generation that decides that.
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Green Bay's opposite reality: While Lake Michigan's whitefish collapse, Green Bay's commercial fishery has grown from $6 million in 2008 to $16 million in 2018 because nutrient runoff compensates for mussel impacts, creating a stark divide between fertile and barren waters.
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The workforce crisis beyond fishers: Michigan and Wisconsin Sea Grant are developing commercial fisheries training programs to recruit the next generation, but labor shortages and competitive wages remain the top challenges even as catch volumes plummet.
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Whitefish as cultural identity: For the Bay Mills Indian Community, whitefish is "the fish species that is most important throughout our creation history," making the population collapse not just an economic loss but an erasure of Anishinaabe cultural heritage.
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The deeper warming problem: NOAA research reveals that Lake Michigan's deep waters are warming 0.11 degrees per decade, disrupting the seasonal turnover cycle that brings oxygen to deep waters and affecting whitefish spawning conditions in ways that compound the mussel crisis.