Crappie blip

I talked to Tony at the Bemidji Regional DNR office. I had left a message about the crappie boom on Red Lake, specifically if a 5 fish crappie limit would protect the population against a crash?
Well he gave me lots of information about crappies in Red and the present and past “booms”.
First and most important, it isn’t a boom it’s a “blip”. The reason being that we are seeing one year class now, the 2018 class. They had a successful spawn in 2018 because the entire month of May 2018 had very low winds. The shallow bowl of Red has no bays or bullrush flats to protect the crappie nests. Wind will pound the nest ground and or cover them with silt.
The 1995 “blip” probably happened because of low walleye and pike numbers due to netting. It lasted 10-11 years because that is the typical life span of crappies, and natural mortality takes place and the boom is done. Interestingly however they have seen a 19 year old crappie!
Our current blip will follow a similar natural mortality rate. So we may have a few more years of good crappie fishing. Tony doesn’t think a reduced bag limit would have a significant impact in prolonging the blip because it is a single year class which will die of old age anyway. And because only 17% of the lake is open to the public. The fish migrate around the whole lake and aren’t exposed to predation in the whole basin. He thinks that some crappies are caught as bycatch in the walleye/ pike nets and by subsistence fishing.
The bottom line is that Red isn’t a natural crappie lake so they can’t be managed like walleyes. We get these blips every few decades so it enjoy while it lasts. The good news is that the walleye population is in great shape (my assessment).
Also the 2022 crappie class might be good. They won’t know until this fall when they do their population netting and see how many of that class is caught. Fingers crossed!

Interesting read. Thanks for sharing.

Tony is spot on. This matches what all the old knowledgeable locals have told me about the red crappie spawn and population.

When this one fizzles out no doubt people will blame FFS and over harvest. I am always amazed when people blame population declines on hook and line fisherman when they can fish less than 20% of the mighty massive red lake.

I’m interested to see their survey results for this year. Will be on Lakefinder which usually gets posted over the winter.

Thanks for the insight, very cool

Just saw this now- thanks for sharing. Learned a little bit

Yeah it was a good conversation and informative. He was confident that walleyes were in good shape. And if crappies have another year class coming up that is good news.