Thread: KY Lake Fall Shindig. helping with KDFWR data collection

Hello everyone,

As you all know the fall shindig is on November 10th and will include a fruit jar tournament and a fish fry. KDFWR would like your help to collect a little bit of information from the fish caught during that tournament. For the three weeks prior to that event KDFWR will be conducting our annual crappie trap net sampling on Kentucky and Barkley lake. We will collect thousands of crappie from each lake and then take a subsample of those fish to analyze for age and growth rates. We age crappie using otoliths which are tiny bones inside the fish's head that lay down annual growth rings similar to tree rings.

Trapnetting is very effective at capturing juvenile and young adult fish, but tends to be biased against trophy size fish. So although trapnetting gives us the best possible estimate of year class strength using small fish, we would love to get more information about growth rates of trophy size fish. Because our sample and your tournament are happening so close together, we would like to stop by and collect otoliths as they are being weighed and dressed.

If you're fishing in the tournament and wish to participate, we would need you to record the locations (embayment is better, but which lake at a minimum) of the fish you catch. The bigger the fish the better because age can be highly variable when dealing with trophy size fish. A 7 inch fish is almost always a 1 year old, but a 12 inch fish could be 3 - 8 years old. Not every fish will require aging, but we will try to post the ages of your fish here on crappie.com once we've looked at them under a microscope. We do not need the filets, but we are not opposed to taste tests once they've been dressed up in their cornbread tuxedos.

By the time of the tournament we should have a good idea of how the 2016 spawn turned out, and an early indication of the 2017 spawn. Obviously we would be happy to answer any questions or listen to any criticism you might have regarding the fisheries in kentucky's western district.

Thanks in advance for helping us out with this,

- Adam Martin, Fisheries Biologist III KDFWR

Thanks again for allowing us to collect some data on the fish. I will post the ages and sizes of the fish collected once we take a look at them under the microscope.