Opening day of fishing was Saturday.
If you headed out on the water, you might have hooked something that started out in the DNR's Wild Rose fish hatchery.
What started off as just a few ponds with retaining walls 115 years ago has grown into a state of the art hatchery; the largest of the DNR's 10 across the state.
It's an all year round effort in order to keep up with the need and demand of Wisconsin fishermen, but how exactly is the process done?
"So we're catching wild fish with either electro shocking gear or nets or in the case of Lake Michigan the fish come to us." Explains Jesse Landwehr, who supervises the hatchery. "We're spawning those fish, fertilizing the eggs and that's the first step of the process that comes back to the hatchery here."
Once the eggs are collected they continue their incubation process in containers before hatching and being moved to barrels which hold 15,000 fish each.
Finally, when mature enough, they are housed in buildings called 'raceways' until the time comes to be released.
Even trophy fish such as walleye start out small enough to fit 70,000 of them inside a soda can.
But the importance of what the hatchery does goes far beyond just providing fish for people to catch.
"We also do rehabilitative stocking in lakes that may have froze out or we have had an issue with them in the past. Poor habitat, poor water quality, we're rehabbing those lakes by stocking fish so that natural reproduction can get going again"
