I seen a fish kill Friday.

I went to a small lake or in rural MN on Friday and there was a massive crappie kill. Literally every shoreline had dead fish on it, in the lily pads, some in the middle of the lake. I also saw crappie near the surface floundering. I had been there 5 days earlier and never saw a one. I called the regional fisheries office this afternoon and reported it. I was surprised other specie weren’t seen, with the exception of a carp or two. If I hear any updates from the fisheries office I will post here. Lots of ag fields surrounding the lake.

What lake?

Pretty sure there was blue-green algae in one of the lakes I fished in this weekend. The weird part was I noticed that there was way less algae and more tannins than normal earlier in the year. Large amounts of runoff from the recent rains?

You will never know cause he had good fishing there last week and would get stoned to death on here for giving up the name of a small lake.

Here’s a link to information on columnaris from the DNR. Not saying this is what it is, but sounds similar.

https://files.dnr.state.mn.us/areas/fisheries/montrose/Columnaris%20Disease.pdf

Yeah there’s no way I’d ever name drop a small lake with good fishing on the internet. The dnr lady asked how many dead fish I saw. I told her about 1,000.

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There’s a lake by me with a lot of crappie and that lake goes through this about every 3 years or so. Crappie only. The weird thing is that you don’t even notice the difference when fishing -aside from some years the average size is generally better. There’s that many more that you don’t see that aren’t affected and it probably helps the population in the long run to thin the herd a little.

Yeah I’m def on a mission to find this small lake with dead fish!

Always sad to see, sorry. You would think we would have little of this this year because of cool temps. Lots of run off this year with heavy rains.

It was Clear Lake….

Could have been Mud Lake

Yup, Clear as Mud

Lake Nunya.

Long Lake

IT’s all the fowled hooked ones….

Barotrauma?

JEREMY wrote:

Barotrauma?

Probably barotrauma from FFS. Did you see Weibe out there?

Kidding aside, keep in mind fish kills usually are a good thing. Might be good size structure out there in the next few years.

I bet it is Live Imaging users.

Not from being caught, but because the transducer makes such an awful noise underwater than it frightens the fish and they all run into each other.

So it was to get your limit, picking up fish?

Did the fish have a motive or was it just a random killing? Badum-cha

Riverrat wrote:

Did the fish have a motive or was it just a random killing? Badum-cha

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I saw a fish kill on the St Croix last night too. These ones didn’t go to waste though.

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Maybe bird flu.

The authorities said there was no threat to the public.

Between all the runoff and the heat, there are going to be a lot this year I think. My neighbors have a cabin on Madison Lake by Mankato, and they said the algae is so bad they don’t think they will be swimming in the middle of the lake much longer, as last weekend was pretty gross already. Shore/dock swimming has been off the table for a while now.

I seen a fish kill last week on a small lake. Mostly all crappie. I just talked to the DNR supervisor, they went and checked it out. The water is dirty on this lake, they went and did a D.O. reading and found there was no oxygen below 6 ft of water. This forced a lot of the crappie into the shallows where they’re subjected to bacteria etc. and caused the die off. Sounds like it’s fairly common this time of year. He wasn’t overly concerned and wasn’t sending any fish in for testing.

Keep hearing how these kills are good. I can think of at least 2 metro lakes that had very good panfish that had kills over 15 years ago and they still have not come back. I’ll even name the lakes: Mann, & Valentine.