Saline-Larto drawdown and other stuff
Got a chance to talk to the W&F chief fisheries biologist today and learned the following:
The Cross Bayou weir in Saline-Larto will be completely rebuilt using pilings and rocks. This will require the system to be lowered about 2 feet but it's not clear when the construction will begin.
A study shows that on a yearly basis, D'Arbonne crappie fishermen harvest less than 5 fish a day per person. As a result, lowering the creel limit really has little affect on the crappie population because the number of fish taken by fishermen is small when compared to the number that die of natural/predatory causes.
The Yucatan and other active Mississippi River oxbows which have experienced a decline in crappie fishing lately are probably just the victims of natural forces. On average, crappie live about 2 years. The 2011 flood caused poor water quality (oxygen) in spawning areas, which resulted in a poor spawn. Then there was a drought in 2012, which caused another poor spawn. Thus, we are now experiencing the result of two years of poor spawning and are catching fewer, but larger (older), fish. That being said, there is some concern that the increasing numbers of Asian carp in the Mississippi system might be affecting game fish populations. The carp feed on plankton, which is the building block of the food chain, and that could have an adverse affect on all game fish populations.
There was an incident on Caney Lake last winter (I think that's when it was but I might be wrong) where large numbers of apparently uninjured shad were floating on the surface. It was very mysterious until they finally realized that cormorants were diving down as deep as 35 feet to feed. The birds spooked the shad down deep, and the shad quickly swam to the surface to escape the birds. Then they couldn't go back down because of their overly expanded air bladders. Weird.
