Panfish regulations

[adamr]

here in missouri there is a wide range of regulations on lakes. the lake i fish most often is an 8000 acre impoundment with a 30 fish limit with no min. length limit, and to be honest i catch a lot more smaller fish here than at the lakes with the 15 fish, 9 or 10 inch limits. i definitely think that the length limits are a good thing.

[Moose1am]

The smaller crappie have not been to school as long as those larger slabs and therefore are dummer than owl crap. LOL


The smaller fish are much more active than the larger older slabs. I think it has to do with High Cholesterol Blood levels in the older crappie and also I figure that the old farts have arthritis as well. Just like little human kids the young crappie are always ready to play and be active. While the old farts just want to sit around by the Brush pile and watch the young kids play.

You don't get big by being dumb. Seriouly the larger and older crappie are probably smarter and have seen a hook or two. If not personally they may have watched other's get caugth and figured out that sucking in that fake jig is not good for thier health.

I know my captive crappie are behaving this way. The older bigger White Crappie won't move very far to catch a minnow. He knows that eventually the minnows will swim by his nose and he will not have to move to get an easy meal. While the smaller fish are so agressive that they practically swim around in circles when I come into the room. Yes they can see me even when I just stick my head around the doorway to the room. They can either send the vibrations of me walking down the hallway to their room or they see the hallway lights coming on. I am sure that there are other clues to my presence and I seem to sense that they know that I am there to feed them minnows. But it's been over a year now and they are keen to associate my presence with either a bad or good experience. The good experience are being feed a bunch of chub minnows or the bad experience is being taken out of the aquarim via a net and put into my 48 quart cooler temporarily so that I can clean their aquarium's gravel and change the water. Since 9 times of of 10 I am there just to feed them they usually get moving around in the aquarim when they see me approach. Especially the smaller Warmouth, which gets very active and actually comes to the end of the aquarium to look out at me. He follows me around and will rise up to the top of the water when I am dropping fresh minnows in the tank. The black crappie is very much like this also as he too eagerly will shows visible signs of being ready to feed. His nose points upwards and his eyes will follow me around the room. At times when they are really hungry they will all three come to the edge of the glass to watch me when I am in the room.

So I am thinking that wild crappie (Slabs) are also very finicky at times and the reason is that they have been to bigger schools. LOL

Crappie seem to be the one species that keep themselves in check. The journals I keep show good years and bad years for crappie fishing on individual lakes. I believe this has to do with a lot of circumstances during a year class spawn: water quality, predation, nutrient levels (food chain stability), etc. Good year class spawns will have a two-three year window of outstanding fish populations. During these good years, a few bad spawns will all but shut down a good crappie lake.
What's interesting, (and I have no documentation to support this), is that after a really bad spawn, the species tends to come back in a big way.
Another thing I just recently took notice to is that crappie school by age class (age class meaning by size). My home lake was always thought to have a "stunted" panfish population - but I didn't buy the notion. There were too many "occasional" large fish being reported. I spent 98% of last year concentrating on this waterway, and that is when I noticed the schooling pattern. If I found a brushpile that produced 8-9" fish, that's all I would catch. If I moved around, usually just deeper, I could locate larger fish - and collected groups of them. I still don't think I found the largest fish in the lake, but I can put the boat over fish that were thought to be non-exsistent in the lake.

There have been two situations that I was involved in that shows large crappie aren't that easy to hook up with (at least in Pa.). One was on Yellow Creek Lake in October - we had a guy that found a school of decent crappie around a blowdown, verified by a camera view, that wouldn't hit. Without the camera, they may have never been known to be there. The second was at Lake Marburg (Corp. lake) - we have video of a school of large crappie that would come look at baits but never completely take them. Here again, the fish were there, but certainly didn't give themselves up. Smaller fish would eagerly take our baits - but that doesn't mean the lake didn't have a larger population in it.

[unknown 5]

This thread gets more interesting as it goes. I believe there are a number of big crappie in any lake that has a good forage base. I set and watch the crappie working the shad in my local lake. Sometimes you can get them to hit, often times you can't. There is a large quantity of real stuff to hit, I think they often know the difference between the real stuff and artificials. Just because the average crappie fishermen only catch small crappie doesn't mean the big ones are not there, it may mean the big ones are not hitting anything that may not be 100% natural or the average crappie fisherman doesn't do what it takes to get the big ones to hit. I often see the same thing with catfishermen. The average catter only catchs fiddlers with an occasional decent cat while the savvy catmen usually catch the bigger fish. My point is that regulations may not affect the size of the crappie that much, maybe the highest percentage of crappie fishermen don't have enough skills to consistantly catch big ones.

[Big Zig]

I believe there are a number of big crappie in any lake that has a good forage base. I set and watch the crappie working the shad in my local lake

This is a perfect example of what we are trying to get to the bottom of. What the PFBC (Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commision) has done was introduce shad into lakes that they weren't normally in. The idea was that the crappie would feed on these shad and increased quality would follow. What wasn't figured was what would the shad eat? That caused a shift in the quality of panfish, since now the ecosystem has twice the amount of fish feeding at the same level of the food chain. Their answer was to introduce striped bass to balance this problem - only thing is - the stripers don't know they're only supposed to eat the shad and are affecting the panfish fingerlings too. It's a vicious cycle some of our waterways are in, and I'm concerned about the future fishery.

[Moose1am]

Why would any Fish and Game Dept or commission add an exotic fish species to any lake. Have they not learned their lessons yet? Never introduce an exotic species to a new aquatic system guys. I would think that moden day fisheries Biologist would know better. Sometimes they tell the powers to be (Politicans appointed by the States Governors to head the F&W Dept) and the appointes don't understand or don't listen and do what they think is best. This results in speices like Carp taking over lakes in the USA. Or Kudzo taking over the entire Southern USa. I could list a few more examples but you get the point.

Let nature decide what will grow and live in our waters.

Gizzard shad can be a boom and bust to a fishery from what I have read.

This is a perfect example of what we are trying to get to the bottom of. What the PFBC (Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commision) has done was introduce shad into lakes that they weren't normally in. The idea was that the crappie would feed on these shad and increased quality would follow. What wasn't figured was what would the shad eat? That caused a shift in the quality of panfish, since now the ecosystem has twice the amount of fish feeding at the same level of the food chain. Their answer was to introduce striped bass to balance this problem - only thing is - the stripers don't know they're only supposed to eat the shad and are affecting the panfish fingerlings too. It's a vicious cycle some of our waterways are in, and I'm concerned about the future fishery.

[unknown 5]

Shad eat plankton. Here in Central Illinois, the lakes get alot of fertilizer runoff and there is plenty of plankton which produces plenty of shad which feed most of the predators like crappie. I don't think shad compete with too many sportfish, I think they provide a food source for them. Here in Central Illinois, shad is a good thing. I personally believe the big panfish are there, it is that most folks don't catch them.
In other areas of the country, it can be totally different.

[Big Zig]

Here's something I found in my travels. I wish I could take credit for it, as it is a good read:

At one time both gizzard and threadfin shad were stocked in manmade impoundments to provide food for desired sport fish. It became apparent that problems caused by introduction of shad could outweigh the benefits, especially in small impoundments. To understand why these problems occur, the habits and life histories have to be taken into account. Shad spawn in the spring or early summer. The first food of shad (and most other game fish species) is microscopic animals called zooplankton and protozoa. This diet is soon supplemented by free- floating algae, called phytoplankton, and insect larvae.
Shad have a distinct advantage over other fish species because of their ability to filter large amounts of water through long, closely set gill rakers. As the water passes through the gill rakers, free-floating plants and animals are filtered out as food.
This enables shad to compete much more effectively for food with other fish that rely on the same diet, such as sunfish and recently hatched bass and crappie. Shad also graze for algae and small insects over logs and other underwater objects, but their main way of feeding is simply swimming and pumping water through their mouths and out their gills.
Gizzard shad are especially prone to cause problems in very fertile bodies of water due to their ability to quickly grow so large that most predators cannot eat them. It is not uncommon for adult gizzard shad (eight inches long and larger) to comprise 60 to 80 percent of the total fish in fertile impoundments. When this happens the shad often out-compete sunfish and other young-of-year sport fish for food, and will even become so overcrowded that their body condition will decline to the point that the shad cannot produce many offspring. Since these shad will be too large for most sport fish to eat, sport fish such as bass, bream, and crappie grow and reproduce very little until most of the large shad die and the remaining shad spawn again.
Threadfin shad can also produce large numbers of offspring which will out-compete sport fish species for food. While threadfin do not grow too big for predators to eat like gizzard shad, they can still make up most of the fish biomass in a body of water due to their filter feeding ability and high reproductive rates. High densities of shad only occur in slow moving rivers, reservoirs or small impoundments with relatively high fertility rates. Water bodies with low fertility rates or which stay muddy are not conducive to filter feeders and will not support large numbers of shad.
Since shad can become overcrowded in small impoundments, they are not generally recommended for stocking. In certain situations, fisheries managers have had some success with periodically applying small concentrations of rotenone to small impoundments with excessive numbers of adult shad. By conducting a “selective treatment,” the adult shad do not become overcrowded and small young-of-year are produced consistently.
Some private pond owners have actually gone back to stocking shad as forage, although now they are more careful to only stock threadfin. Even when only threadfin shad are present, well-fertilized ponds often tend to become shad crowded within two to four years after shad are established. Ponds in this situation generally support mostly small bluegill, with a bass population lower in number than ponds with no shad present. However, once bass grow to a size they can prey on the shad, bass growth rates are extremely high.
Pond owners considering stocking threadfin shad to manage for large bass should certainly consider the negative consequences. There will be fewer bass and bream available for harvest, the bream growth rates will be adversely impacted, and the shad population will probably need to be partially poisoned when the adult shad become overcrowded and stop spawning. Shad are also extremely sensitive to water quality and temperature changes, so sudden shad die-offs are not uncommon.
There has been very little large-scale research conducted on establishing threadfin shad in small impoundments, so reliable stocking rate recommendations are not available at this time. Last but not least, any introduction of threadfin shad has the potential to also introduce gizzard shad. While gizzard and threadfin shad are certainly important as forage fish in many of Alabama’s rivers and reservoirs, the potential problems shad can cause should be carefully considered before the are stocked in any body of water.