Red Lake Crappies… not rivers but interesting!

We received an article from Chris Tuckner based on a trip he took to Red Lake in pursuit of those monster slab crappies. He caught his crappies…. but he also found out something very interesting about the future of the crappie fishery up there. I know this is completely off the river theme we have here but so many have made the run to Red, I thought I’d share it with you anyway.

Not to give away the crux of the article, but if you haven’t made it to Red already, you might have already missed it!

Here’s the link to the article: Red Lake – Crappie Heaven

Nothing lasts forever….

Good fishin’,

EFN Webstaff

“Nothing lasts forever…. ”

This is very true do to everyone has a different perspective on how things should be managed.

I have one of those fathers that always refers to “When I was a kid….” And “We used to catch all kinds of…all the time…”

What was not looked at in those days was the actual reproducing population of fish Vs the aduquate amount of suitable habitat in a given body of water

As an example: You have lake or river “XYZ”. The overall size is 5000 acres. The max depth is 87 feet with the average depth is 42 feet and 5.1 miles of shoreline. (porportion may be off a little) When comparing oxygen levels, weed growth, and bottom structure we find that the body of water has merely 1200 acres of suitable habitat.

Now looking at a healthy lake of 11 adult reproducing walleyes per acre we have about 13.5 thousand walleyes present. Consider this body of water within 50 miles of a major metropolitian city ie. Milwaukee. You now have about 1/2 a million fisherman hitting that lake over a given year. The odds don’t look so good; do they?

The same pricipal works for all species. Then look at the pressure during “peek” times…Spawning, ice-out, winter staging, accessablility.

I have seen some awsome bodies of water fished out in a short period of time. I am NOT saying don’t keep and eat fish. I’ll be the first to jump up and tell you how good a walleye fry tastes. Just need to use good judgement!

The crappies of Red Lake aren’t going to be fished out… the population that took advantage of a man-made condtion and flourished beyond normal conditions will simply play out its normal life span, or be caught, and without any large year classes coming up to replace the present ones, populations will simply dwindle.

This phenomenal fishing on Red was/is more of a freak event caused by humans almost completely removing the crappies predators and competition for food than it was a way in which the crappie populations were managed. As soon as the walleye pops. were brought back, the crappie pops. were destined to decline.

I agree entirely with what you are saying here. Man influenced conditions caused this and nature will eventually restore. My piont was more to the decline of populations in other lakes that get pounded to death, everybody screams bloody murder about how it was, and the still keep ever adult fish they catch.

I am fortunate to live in central wisconsin where we still have some good fisheries. However, popularity has kicked in over the last few years. Now I have seen the “man’s influence” tilt the scales because of imbalanced pressure for a specific species. I want everyone to go out catch all the fish they ever would want to catch. It just does not happen when we over harvest.

I agree on Red. Keep’em.! This is a man influenced situation. I just want to raise some awareness to why we have such an influx of poipulations on so called natural lakes and rivers.