In a recent thread about catching Eyes in hot summer conditions there was much talk about location of fish vs temps and light penetration…… Ive been trying to check into this… and just stumbled across an article in the july-august-september walleye insider… it was a short piece titled “walleyes need cold water”…. based on some research done by Penn State university in 1998 on the Pymatuning Sanctuary, a shallow eutrophic reservoir….. basically it was a graph of body condition vs water temp at time of capture……
and it noted that the higher the temp the worse the body condition…. what I thought was “strange” was it was noted that 72 degrees was the optimum temp and that between 55-72 the walleyes were easier to catch (assumed to be more active)…. and yet the graph showed a constant degradation in body condition from the lowest graphed temp of 50 to the highest of 80, they alos noted that 85 degrees was “nearly” lethal to walleyes….
honestly I dont know what to make of this……
why would there be a constant degradation of body condition? if 72 is “optimum” wouldnt their condition be optimum at that point too? how can 85 be almost lethal? I wonder how long fish can be exsposed to that and live? I would think quite a while?
anyway that seemed to give me more questions than answers……
as for light penetration… so far as Ive found, there is nothing to suggest the fish might locate differently to avoid “discomfort”, but most likely they will be less active when the conditions are bright and clear… mostly thought to be the result of bait fish being clearly able to avoid them…. I could see this as a problem in lakes…. but less so in rivers……
anyone have any input on this?
July 18, 2001 at 8:06 pm
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