Fishing in water deeper than 25' or deeper than 33' (one atmosphere) can cause problems when you reel the fish up out of the depth's too quickly and they don't have time to expel the air out of their air bladder. I'm not sure about the physiology of the Crappie's Swim bladders. Some fish have tiny capillaries surrounding the outside of the swim bladder and oxygen, nitrogen and other gases diffuse from the swim bladder into the tiny capillaries and vise versa. The rate of diffusion is what I don't know. But if you pull up a big crappie from deep water and you see the air bladder expanded and distending the fish's body and the fish's eye bugging out you might as well keep that fish and eat it as I fear that the stress of being pulled up too fast will kill the fish. And if the expanded air bladder doesn't kill the fish the bacteria that are introduced into it's body by the fizzing process may kill it later on after it's released. Or maybe not. I do know that the fish have scales and slim on their outer body to help protect them from viruses and bacteria in the water. And if you remove too much of the slim and scales fall off that bacteria may enter into the fish. Then it's up to the fish's immune system to fight off those bacteria before they can multiply in the blood stream of the fish. Bacteria can double in numbers ever 20 minutes. So 2 bacteria can become 4 in just 20 minutes time. And four can become 8 in another 20 minutes time. If the fish survive being pulled up out of the deep and having a hypodermic needle stuck though their body and into their air bladder then they are pretty tough critters. I hope that they all survive and live to reproduce and pass on those good genes.


Quote Originally Posted by UK_Angus View Post
from the crappie usa facebook page...

...Darrell Van Vactor demonstrates to some fishermen how to "fizz" the air bladder on a crappie here at our CrappieUSA Classic on Lake Cumberland. Due to some extreme depths of water some of these crappie are being caught they require their air bladder adjusted in order for them to survive. The technique is called "fizzing" using a hypodermic needle...

Looks like they went deep... at least some.