I know this is an old thread but I just ran across it. We are still working on Lake Charles crappie population. We are trying to gather as much info as we can to figure out why the fish are not growing much after age-1. The age-1 growth is good but they basically stop growing after that. It is likely a density dependent problem. There appears to be high recruitment of crappie but not enough food to allow the high number of crappie to reach greater sizes. Studies have shown that saugeye are great at controlling and fixing a stunted crappie population; however, we cannot stock them in Lake Charles because the saugeye could escape and start breeding with the sauger in the Black River. We will continue to gather info on this population this coming fall. We are going to be looking at specifically at diets this fall.

There was question about why do drawdowns. Drawdowns have several benefits and drawbacks. The main drawback is access to the water and it causes the fish to move to different areas of the lake than normal. Benefits include the following things: 1) Drawdowns allow prey species that are in shallow habitats to be more vulnerable to predations. This fish likely grow very little and are not benefiting the lakes. The predator species including crappie feed on these prey species in the fall. This extra energy storage allows the fish to have more reserve left to make it through the winter months thus more energy can be put into reproduction in the following spring, 2) while the lake is down, terrestrial vegetation begins to grow. When flooded, it gives cover to the new hatched fry. 3) As the vegetation decomposes, it increases the amount of nutrients in the water, which increase the amount of plankton in the water. More plankton means more food for the fry and species that utilize plankton like shad, 4) while the shoreline is exposed; it allows the bottom to harden. When flooded, there is more hard bottom for species that spawn utilizing beds (crappie, bass, and bluegill), and 5) exposing the lake bottom allows the muck layer in the lake to harden. This reduces the filling in rate of the lake. All lakes are going to fill in one day but this help to reduce this rate. This is just a few of the benefits of the drawdowns.

Sunfish populations are hard to manage. They often exhibit boom or bust reproduction. This type of reproduction can lend itself to stunting. Some of the best sunfish lakes like Lake Hogue often times have numerous small bass. We are currently managing Lake Hogue for sunfish.

Please remember that we are dealing with Mother Nature. She does what she wants all the time. We try our best to manage the fish populations to best of our abilities. I am not saying we are always correct but that doesn’t mean we don’t try hard and care about the fisheries of the state. There are many of the AGFC biologists that are just as diehard fishermen and we want to catch a bunch of fish too.

Like always, we are here if you have any questions or want to know more about what are doing around the area lakes.