Crappie Stomach Contents

When I keep fish, I usually examine what the were eating and Im sometimes surprised what I find. This year the crappie have had a mushy 'farina' like goo in their upper stomach. It is a lite tan/cream color with the texture of farina/cream of wheat. Any idea what that is? This is on adult 11-14 inch fish.

I know when they are young they focus on zooplankton as a food source but as they get older they move onto larger food such as fry. Do they still feed heavily on plankton as adults when fry are getting scarce?

Im in NY and we are at the tail end of ice season.

TIA

No idea :dono but i'm curious:popcorn

If you see a green or purple stripe on their head ..... Then you will know they are woke vegans.

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Originally Posted by ACAMS

If you see a green or purple stripe on their head ..... Then you will know they are woke vegans.

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Theyd be eating phytoplankton, not zooplankton...... Hahahaha

could be partially digested small somethings that didn't retain their original colors and shapes maybe ?

Probably the remains of insect larvae they've plucked from the bottom substrate, or caught when first emerging.

Yesterday Houston County Lake was chock full of little gray spiders ... Had trouble keeping web off my line .... maybe it was spiders!

Here Crappie feed mostly on fish with Shad being the main diet . They are opportunistic feeders. Seen small Drum, Bluegill, Minnows and even small Crappie in their gut . I am sure they eat insects, Grass Shrimp, Crawfish or whatever is in the water where you fish .:twocents

Crappies are filter feeders besides the normal small minnows, crustaceans my guess is there is some kind of insect hatch going on.

You know .... it "could be" just undigested remains of whatever they most recently ate. Water being cold, they don't eat much or often and what they do eat takes longer to digest (them being cold blooded & all).

Personally, most of the time the Crappie I catch don't have anything in their stomachs, except maybe some "leftover" sludge from what they recently digested. And I do randomly check stomach contents, & if I see a "bulge" in the stomach ... just out of curiosity.

I asked Google AI ... does a fish's stomach break down the poop of the fish they eat ?? Here's what the answer was (as I suspected) :

No, a fish's stomach does not break down the poop of the fish they eat; when a fish eats another fish, its digestive system only breaks down the edible tissues of the prey, leaving behind undigestible components like bones and scales which are then excreted as part of the fish's own fecal matter.


Key points to remember:

• Digestive process:
  A fish's stomach secretes digestive enzymes that target specific nutrients in the food it consumes, not the waste products of other fish.
• Waste elimination:
  The undigested parts of the prey fish, including any fecal matter it may have had in its digestive tract, are simply passed through the predator fish as part of its own poop.

I was fascinated to see similar things on the ten I examined the other day. I know for certain that some I caught previously had been eating huge shad, but these had no bait fish parts at all. Even the ones that had huge bulging bellies had lots of eggs, but no fish parts.

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