Would lowering the striper population be a good thing?

[foolhardy]

I'm at Lewis Smith Lake in Alabama and I'm reading that stripers are hurting/have hurt the crappie population. Would keeping and eating the stripers that I catch, instead of throwing them back, help out? I know that there are probably hundreds of thousands of stripers in there. Would keeping larger ones help more than keeping smaller ones, or vice versa?

Thanks for the info.

Also, I'm a new member trying to figure out how to catch crappie. I have a small lot on crooked creek and have dropped four "crappie condos" (Cheap and Simple Fish Habitat (aka Crappie Condo) - YouTube) under my pier three weeks ago to try to attract crappie but I have yet to see any payoff. I tried fishing last Friday night off of the pier with a submerged green light and over an hour and a half could only attract three minnows.

Am I not going to have any luck with crappie this time of year?

[skeetbum]

Welcome from Middle Tennessee. On the contrary, some very good catches come this time of year. Deeper water close to where I fish pays off for me. Stick around and ask questions - no dumb questions here- and you'll figure them out soon. Tight lines

[Mikie]

Here in SW Oklahoma most lakes are regularly stocked with Hybrids (white bass/striper) we also have good walleye and saugeye (sauger/walleye) populations. We also have white and black crappies; the limit is 37 crappie a day no size limit. The thing that supports all these fish is a good shad population. I really don't know which shad they are gizzard or threadfin but they produce thousands a year and all the fish including blue;channel and flathead catfish are all healthy and fat. Try to find out what depth crappie in your lake relate to for each season and base your starting point there. No fish look elsewhere.

[Mumpy]

Striped Bass Life Cycle
"Female striped bass can mature as early as age 4, however, it takes several years (age 8 or older) for spawning females to reach full productivity. Once a mature female broadcast her eggs in the current, they are fertilized by milt ejected from a mature male (age 2 or 3). Depending on the size of the female, one female can lay from 14,000 (3 pounder) to 3,000,000 eggs (10 pounder ).A thirty-pound female is capable of producing as many as five million eggs."

Needless to say, I doubt you'll ever catch enough stripers in your lifetime to have an effect on their population.

[Locator79]

I fish a lake with tons of stripers anywhere from 1lb to 30 lbs. and the population is huge. The only time I ever catch a striper while crappie fishing is in the late fall, when fish are holding on ledges and feeding on schools of shad, and are in competition for food. I consistantly catch limits of crappie and have for years at this lake. Stripers are not usaually in small impoundments, and as long as there is plenty of food for for all species, I dont't think it would hurt your crappie population. Just my opinion, I have science to back it up. On a side note, those big striper fillets are pretty good on the grill if cooked and cleaned the right way.

[foolhardy]

Thanks for the info. I'm a little wary to eat Striper because I've read that they contain too much mercury.

[olduckhunter]

i read somewhere that a study done on what stripers eat and 95% was shad. very little game fish do/did they eat.

[Locator79]

Thanks for the info. I'm a little wary to eat Striper because I've read that they contain too much mercury.

I would think that if the stripers in your lake have too much mercury, then all the fish would have too much mercury?

[MeanV2]

I's think the same thing

Dan

I would think that if the stripers in your lake have too much mercury, then all the fish would have too much mercury?

[crappiefarmer]

The only way to knock down the striper population is to have a community campaign and have large numbers of people catching the stripers with the intent to lower the population. It can be done but one man on his own can't do it on a large body of water.

Stripers will eat any fish when their preferred forage is not available. If they eat up all the shad or the shad die off from a fish kill, they will eat game fish. If You could eat steak everyday, You would until the steak was gone. Then You would settle for a hot dog cause that is all that is available. Stripers are no different. They will eat just about anything else when anything else is all they have. If You know what the seasonal patterns are for shad and find no stripers in the places where there are normally shad and are finding stripers where other game fish are for the time of year, then that could be a tip as to what is going on. It still can be hard to figure with shad though because so many species have shad as their primary forage. The old saying of find the bait, find the fish would work against you in this circumstance. But if You have been catching stripers at X river channel for years at this time of year but are now catching stripers at popular crappie holes, then it could be that the shad are depleted and they have moved to other sources of protein. In this case crappie or white perch or even bass.CF