Do lake trout migrate within their lake?
Yes — vertical and horizontal migrations on a basin scale, the largest home range of the three species. A big lake's lakers may summer over one deep basin, travel kilometers (miles) to traditional rocky spawning shoals in October, and spread across shallow flats all winter; telemetry on large lakes shows individual fish covering tens of kilometers (dozens of miles) in a season and returning to the same spawning shoal year after year. Daily movement is vertical: holding at temperature, rising to raid bait schools, dropping back. This is why laker fishing is a sonar-and-map game where bass fishing is a cover game — you are intercepting a traveler at a bottleneck, not knocking on a resident's door.
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More questions about Movement & range
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