Thread: Too Many Dinks! What do you do!

How does a slot limit work? Would something like that help, reckon?

Originally Posted by BigRiverMarine

This is WAY to deep for most of us. Sounds like a real biologist is needed here.

You are absolutely correct BigRiver. I've been involved with several (5) such endeavors. Even when the biologists said "remove the dinks"; it didn't change many mindsets. Those that didn't want to, didn't. So, those 5 small lakes are still full of dinks. A crappie will only grow as large as his/her environment will allow. Not enough food to support large crappie means no large crappie. I realize that taking small fish is not cool to some people, but the population won't increase in size. Even the dinks spawn every year. As someone else said, a 5/6 incher may be 4 or 5 years old.

JIgflinger,
You're absolutely right. A body of water will self regulate the size of it's crappie accordingly to the numbers of fish, size of the impoundment, and available food sources. Lake Nimrod will never have the great numbers of big slabs that it had back in the 70's until "every" fisherman starts taking a few dinks out with their daily catch. I'm going to do it and "praise" any body else that does it also.
The ones that don't do it are the minority and in my opinion are just adding to the problem. I'm no biologist and don't pretend to know it all about this. I would really like to see a true fisheries biologist chime in and give us their opinion.

I spoke with Sam and Sam the biologists in NEAR a couple years ago. They asked me if I was keeping any bass. I said a few from time to time. They asked me to keep them all because the lake was overpopulated and the bass were staying small because of it. Also, a small pond of just a few acres had some crappie put in it a few years ago. Now at the pond you can catch over a 100 each day and not one will be over 6 inches.

Does Nimrod have a size limit on their crappie? If the state regulations say a 10" minimum for example, what ya gonna do, risk getting a ticket/fine. Tellico Lake is my home lake, there is a 10" limit here in TN. I catch lots and lots of dinks, is it because of a shortage of food or I'm in the wrong place, don't know, doesn't really matter alot to me. I do prefer to catch the keepers but I don't catch many. Even when I do catch keepers, I usually throw 'em back hoping I can catch 'em again and again. I go fishing to go fishing, have something to do, get out of the house, etc. I don't fish to fill my freezer with filets like alot of guys do. Not knocking the guys who keep 'em, personal choice. Even if I caught 15 keepers in a day, pretty sure I would not keep 'em.

They tried a 10' limit several years ago and it just didn't seem to work so they abandoned it. They sent some trap net samples to the lab and had them aged and they reported that the crappie in Nimrod grow fast. It's only a 3550 acre lake and on most years has terrific spawns.
We had a very small farm pond when I was a kid and the crappie were plentiful but probably over populated. Always caught small ones. The bass gorged themselves on them though. Caught bass up to 8 lbs!

AGFC needs a call and they need to remove some of these dinks and restock lakes that need it. When i go to a lake and see allot of dinks and the fish are skinny. The anwser is simple they are starving and over populating due to great breeding habitat. Not to mention other species like Bass Catfish, and gar eating the baitfish. The quickest way to correct this is shock or netting taking some of the game fish and allot of dinks out of the lake, along with fisherman taking some smaller fish to eat. In short the anwser is simple too many game fish in a great breeding habitat and not enough bait fish to support them.

The Crappie suppose to grow fast and there is lots of food in the lake. I think the major problem is overfishing here.