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I am curious what the eggs look like when they are about to drop. The ones I've been catching lately have a lot of visible blood streaking and they are really mushy. I'm guessing they are really close or am I wrong? I should have taken a pic but I forgot to.
Forgot to add these are black crappie don't know if that matters as far as eggs go.
Mushy eggs are about to drop from my experience. That times already passed in South Alabama.
Quote:
Originally Posted by VaCrappieMan
Been catching 11-12" Black Crappie with light yellow & mushy eggs ... egg sacs the size of golf balls ... and THEY may be "ready" to go, but the conditions are NOT ready for them to go. Males haven't taken up residence on the banks, yet, at least not to any great degree.
I always thought the eggs were ready to drop when they were more "gold" colored, and the individual eggs themselves were much larger than the ones I'm seeing right now. :dono
... cp :kewl
When they fall apart they are ready to go. If you have single eggs everywhere after cleaning fish you know they are dropping or going to drop within days.
blood and vein look is gone or nearly gone...eggs are light colored and sac is losing shape up to eggs are just loose and squirt out easily if you press the belly. You have black and white crappie of different age classes and slightly different development stages. It plays out longer than some people think....but once most of them are done...and a lot of the bed areas have been worked over and a whale of a lot of fish have been caught....finding the remaining fish who may still be on the bed gets to be harder. Many times they are in a place that just has been overlooked. Occasionally you can catch some on a laydown tree where the fish are tucked in under them tight and nobody has just worked hard enough to get it right to them,or a bed on a bank that has just been overlooked. May be just a couple little sticks laying in the right place on the right bottom and there will be a couple or maybe a few on it. Usually still a few somewhere even with surface temps in the 70's. At depth in a place with a current from deeper water ,a spring underwater,at a spawning depth of 5ft or more it may be considerably cooler. And you can sometimes catch the males too. Sometimes have caught the males and females on subsequent drops or cast.
from best i can tell if the run out of the fish easily they are in laying mode ....
as far as color and consistency i am not always sure .....
most of the eggs that run out of them are not BRIGHT yellow though
i would tend to think they are close in alot of places right now and or done to some degree
i do know they are done in some of the spots we frequent ....