Researchers say today’s northern pike are several inches shorter than their ancestors in Michigan lakes. (Photo by Ryan Hagerty/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

(This story was originally published by Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. Visit the newsroom online: bridgemi.com.)

In addition to shorter ski seasons, worsening ticks and allergies and shrinking boreal forests, climate change has hit the Great Lakes State in another way: shrinking fish.

That’s according to new research stemming from a massive crowdsourced effort to digitize decades-old scientific observations written on notecards by scientists with what’s now known as the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

Subsequent modeling by University of Michigan and DNR scientists aligned the observati

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