Unlike many other aquatic ecosystems which have experienced regime shifts, Lake Erie fisheries still harvest the top-predators in the ecosystem. This suggests that there are mechanisms in the Lake Erie ecosystem which provide more resilience to fishing "down the food chain". Fisheries resources are shared between Canadian commercial gillnet fishermen and American sports fishermen. Commercial gillnet fisheries are managed based on closed-quota system and mostly catch mid-sized walleye (Sander vitreus) and yellow perch (Perca flavescens), whereas, sports fisheries are open-access and target larger-sized individuals of the same species. I hypothesize that opportunistic cannibalism and predation between trophic levels of different sized-cohorts and species (including Homo sapiens) provide stability to this food web. My doctoral research will test whether inclusion of intra- and interspecific interactions within and between walleye and yellow perch can improve the population dynamic modelling of both species, and decrease the risk to overfishing.