Does this mean they are absorbing and won't spawn?
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Does this mean they are absorbing and won't spawn?
Hope to hear from the fisheries biologists on this one. Where you guys at '' D10 and Bigben7 ''?
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Yes they are absorbing their eggs. All fish species do this when conditions have not quiet right for the spawn. This spring the temps went up and down several times with some pretty big swings. Rather than just waste it energy on spawning in unfavorable conditioned, they reabsorb the eggs and convert that energy to growth. This is one reason why crappie populations are very cyclical. They have a pretty unpredictable spawn.
Thanks D10 - learn something new every day!
Interesting! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks D10, I thought that was what was happening. Some fish are still carrying healthy looking sacks, so is there a chance of them still spawning to some degree?
What about this happening on the small crappie?? (yes, I cleaned some small crappie with eggs like this in last few weeks)
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This will happen with all sizes. Crappie are like people, they are all a little different. If they started producingtheir eggs latter than the rest, they may still try to spawn this year. I will be doing some single pole sampling tomorrow on Conway. Hopefully I will be able to judge the condition of the females over there.
Good luck hope you catch some nice samples:) thanks for the response , I along with everyone on here, I'm sure appreciates the info and biology lesson.
Also, I'd like to add that it doesn't take every fish in the lake to have a fantastic spawn to keep the population going strong. A lot of people stress out over a few fish not spawning in the part of the lake that they fish. This doesn't mean that in some other arm conditions might have been a whole lot better. We don't recommend folks stocking crappie in ponds less than 25 acres bc in smaller bodies with too much spawning success they will quickly overrun and stunt. There is such thing as "too much of a good thing". That being said this springs weather has been a bummer for fishermen and biologists due to the up and own temps.
D10, with not all fish spawning, would we see a drop off in fish numbers in 3 years?
One year with a poor spawn is no big deal. In fact, some research conduncted in Mississippi, suggests that there is an optimal spawning cycle with crappie. In other words, if you had too many good spawns in a row, it could be a bad thing (as BigBen pointed out). If there were two or more years with a poor spawn, we would need to be a little more worried. That is the good thing about crappie, they are such a prolific spawner, that one good year following a poor year, will more than make up for the mssing crappie. Think about it this way. In many systems there is only so much forage to go around for all of the fish. When there are fewer mouths to feed, from time to time, this leaves more forage for the remaining fish. We see the same effect rebounding off of a drawdown. The remaining fish get fattened up when the lake refills and the shad reproduce. It is an all you can eat buffet for the remaining fish.
I have cleaned quite a few like this recently and like D10's response jigtime
Almost every fish we caught Thursday had eggs..........small, medium, large, huge.........didn't matter. Didn't see the mushy big egg sacs, though........just normal eggs, like they were going to drop within the next week or two, or three. Can't say we kept a single male......although we threw back about 100 fish.........
This was at Nimrod. Haven't figured out where to go in Dardanelle yet. And easier to dance with ugly wimmin that can shake it, than with purty ones that might can, might not can!
I am guessing that the larger and deeper lakes will probably not be as affected by the temperature swings that we have bad this spring, as compared to the shallower/smaller lakes. Crappie on these larger/deeper lakes will probably still have decent spawns. I would be interested to hear what the females on other larger/deeper lakes and smaller/shallower lakes are looking like this weekend. If you do some catching and filleting, let us know what the females eggs looked like. Even better, post a picture.
Didn't take any pics but cleaned 10 nice ones from the Ar river yesterday. About 8 of them were females and all but one had darker orangish colored eggs and they looked like they had been hit with a rolling pin and were soupy.