mike Bayless and Eric Dennis fall crappie samplings

[crappies nightmare]

Mike and Eric I was hoping you could give us a report on your sampling
On crappie at Truman and
Smithville and what we could expect for 2014
Thanks

[Eric Dennis]

Mike and Eric I was hoping you could give us a report on your sampling
On crappie at Truman and
Smithville and what we could expect for 2014
Thanks

I posted this on the Fishing side but it won't hurt to post it on the Ask the Biologist side as well. Hope this is what you are looking for.

Hello Everyone,

I thought I would let everyone know how the crappie trap netting went on Smithville Lake this fall.

First of all, if you look at the graphs, you will see that our catch rates of crappie almost doubled in 2013 from catch rates in 2012. Unfortunately, this does not mean that there are double the crappie in Smithville Lake. It is simply a product of timing, weather, and water temperatures. Any one of these factors can make a huge difference in catch rates from year to year.

So, let's talk about what Black Crappie first. We found a ton of blacks that were around 3" indicating that they had a very successful spawn and a large year class coming through the system. We also have a large group of fish in the 7-8" range. As many of you know the 7-8" range is where the Smithville blacks seem to stunt. This is not uncommon in a lot of ponds and lakes in NW Missouri. Blacks prefer clear water, vegetation, and their diet consists of mainly invertebrates. Smithville is lacking in all three categories. Of the black crappie sampled 35 % are over 8" but only 5% are over the legal limit of 9".

The white crappie are a different story in Smithville. We found that 94% of the whites are over 8" and 62% are over 9". These numbers have remained consistent for the past couple of years and indicate that 2014 white crappie fishing should produce good numbers of legal size fish. One thing to note is the percentage of whites over 10" fell from 41% in 2012 to 13% in 2013. This is nothing to worry about yet. Again, this could be a product of timing, weather or water temperatures. We simply could have missed the larger sized fish the week we sampled. We will continue to monitor the crappie by electrofishing in the spring and nets in the fall.

We get a lot of good information from our lakes on the reports on Crappie.com so please keep them coming. If anyone has any questions about Smithville, I would be more than happy to try and answer them for you.
beagle man, Joedog, KCcrappie and 1 others like this.

[Jigging15]

Now get that dang Bayless to get us Truman's. I will ask him next time he is in the store.

[buzzmanmo]

need a stockton report

[dfar]

Thanks for your good work and passing on the results.

[MOfishmgr]

Until Mike has a chance to get on and reply, here's what he wrote in his 2014 Fishing Prospects (these are available at: http://fishing.mdc.mo.gov/ ):

Truman will continue to be one of the best crappie hot spots in the Mid-west. This year expect a lot of fish between nine and ten inches. Fall sampling found lower numbers of large fish than in recent samples. There are plenty of big crappie out there but expect fewer than what has been out there the last few years. Crappie fishing is excellent throughout the lake. In general the further upstream you go in the lake, you’ll catch more big fish.

[dfar]

Thanks for the update.