Thread: Keepers

Crappie are prolific spawners! On publics waters I agree with size limits on certain lakes because they get high pressure which can be a better thing more often than not. It keeps the crappie population as a whole stable. But on small lakes, reservoirs, or places with little to no pressure them crappie gonna over-populate and stunt growth. Wont take ya long and a lake that could produce trophy sized fish wont have a 10+inch crappie in it. So in my opinion places (I will use my reservoirs as an example) that don't get pressure and/or small need to keep the small and all crappie you catch. If its too small that you dont want to eat it...toss it on the bank and let the raccoons eat. Gotta sacrifice a few to save the rest. Its just nature. I have seen my reservoirs get stunted about every 8-10 years and we have to drain down and start over. We drain down to replace irrigation pipes and stuff like that but the fish also prosper. You can not believe the size crappie we have in that 4-6 year period post-drain down and starting over. Then the next thing you know a couple years after that they all stunted. Some places i fish my standards are very high.... and others I will keep just almost everything. I always do what I feel is best for whichever lake I'm fishing based off of some of the research I have done (not saying im right or wrong). I'm just saying from my interpretations. So if you see me in a pik with a bunch of dinks.....it is either because thats all I can catch or im fishing a lake that needs the dinks removed. Hahahahahahahahaha

Its ok if you have your 14 inch standards and thats very admirable, but if we all had those standards we would eventually, and it wouldn't take long, to catch that "class" fish and above out of public waters. Just think about it, for example, Sardis has a 12 inch minimum. EVERY fishermen that fishes there wants to WEAR the crappie out! And most want to bring the max amount allowed of legal fish (12 inches) home. So people are bringing limits of 12 inch fish out of the lake. To box 15 different 12 inch keepers you are going to have to cull 30-60 non-keeper fish. If people were allowed to keep a 10 inch fish they would take their 15 fish limit home and chances are only 1 or 2 would be 12+ inches. Therefore your are "protecting" your larger fish in the long run. And your larger fish get to live longer and eat and "GROW"! All im saying there is a time when the length limits should be increased and a time it should be decreased. It shud never be an across the board "x" length forever. This will "help" prevent a lake from having good years and then bad years. It will be more constant all the time. Again this is just my opinion of what I have researched.

Lower Pro is correct. It is almost impossible to over fish crappie. 99% of the time the fish over populate and stunt. Without heavy pressure.

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I do agree with you on fish population on lakes and other small body's of water, what I'm speaking of is on the river the only place I fish and I do understand that you must cull a few but a stringer of under 10 in is uncalled for in my opinion.

It's kind of amusing reading this post simply because in Illinois, we keep 9-10" fish all day long, and frankly I believe those 9-10" fish fry up a whole lot better than them 12-15" fish you speak of. But everyone has their opinion.. As long as they're legal in what they be doing its all good.


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See the Lowe Pro post above, multiply it times the black fish post. Square that and multiply times PI and you have the correct answer.

Personally, I think the fishing is great the way it is. We all have our little quirks and habits we like. I have mine, but I would never even attempt to make other people go by my personal "rules". To only keep 14 inch fish is amazing, but not doable on an entire state lake regulation due to it destroying the fishing on every smaller lake. Not enough cormorants to eat enough small crappie to keep from over population.

A few years ago, Mississippi lowered the length on Sardis to 11".(for whatever reason). Folks took out so many 11" crappie that it decimated the population. Finding many 12" fish was really difficult. When you catch the majority of a year class, you don't get large fish. People being people are going to keep most of the legal fish they catch. In the case of Sardis, lowering the MLL to 11" didn't protect the larger fish. People still caught 12"+ fish as well as keeping all the 11 inchers. They have since returned to the 12" minimum and the lake is on the rebound. This demonstrates, to me, that keeping smaller fish means that a harvested 11" fish will never be a 12" or larger fish.

There should be basically no difference whether you are keeping legal 11's or 12's. It just delays or increases the amount of growth time when they can be legally caught. When the lake limit was changed to 11 inches and they were all caught out, and the fishing was worse the next year, this points to not enough 10 inchers the year before. You can't release all the 11 inch fish and have more 12 inch fish than what you had when they were 11s. You can bet your boots that if 12 is the legal limit after a bad spawn year, you will have a shortage of 12's a few years later.

My opinion is that all is fine. Some years you catch more, some years you catch less. Sometimes you catch big ones, sometimes you catch little ones. Now that I think about it, it is just like......fishing.

Not necessarily so, RCC. The year they lowered Sardis to 11 inches had a very good span. I suspect that the Sardis change was politically motivated. All lakes go through a cycle, if you will. This doesn't mean that the fish aren't there. They just hang out in different places that we don't look. It is impossible to fish out a crappie population. However; as was the case with Sardis, people were already catching large numbers of 11 inch fish and having to throw them back. When the length was dropped to 11 inches. Bonanza! Keep them all. After a couple of years of that we lost a complete year class of fish.
.The lake wasn't fished out. You could still go out and catch a hundred crappie a day. All the 6 through 10 inch fish you cared to.And when you factor in the fact that a crappie has a life span of approximately 7-8 years and that a 12 inch fish is a 3 to 4 year old fish, it isn't difficult to see how removing too many 11 fish will have a detrimental effect on the older year class. After you harvest those year classes, it takes several years, after the MLL is raised, to rebound. When they returned to the 12" length at Sardis, they also reduced the bag limit from 20 to 15 per angler with a boat limit of 40 if there are 3 or more anglers in the boat. With these changes the lake is rebounding.