Quote Originally Posted by Blackdog40 View Post
With the dramatic increase of blue cats and the sudden collapse of the crappie fishing at Melvern are a lot of the crappie finding a home in the bellies of blue cats. Caught a nice on last week and it had a 1 pound crappie in its gut along with a few smaller crappie.
The decrease in crappie density at Melvern is more likely a result of several factors such as prolonged drought, low spawning production resulting from low water levels/lack of spring inflows, low forage/shad density, and negative effects resulting from the zebra mussel population.

While the Melvern blue cats do eat crappie as well as a variety of other fish species, this predation by the blue cat population is not responsible for the drop in crappie numbers.