Kentucky-Barkley managers to propose trial stockings to bolster crappie fishing

[aceoky]

From Saturday's Paducah Sun Outdoor Section:

Stocking up
Kentucky-Barkley managers to propose trial stockings to bolster crappie fishing

By Steve Vantreese

Saturday, February 14, 2009

A public parlay between fisheries managers and anglers about how to pump up the crappie fishing of Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley may herald a new twist for the giant lakes: hatchery crappie.

The meeting is set for 6:30-9 p.m. Tuesday at Miss Scarlett’s restaurant just off the Grand Rivers exit of I-24. Paul Rister, district fisheries biologist for the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, among others will address a League of Kentucky Sportsmen resolution passed as a plan to boost crappie fishing that has declined in recent years on the big sister lakes.

The LKS initially asked for the closing of some bays, seeking a temporary crappie fishing ban on, among others, the rear section of the Blood River arm of Kentucky Lake. The sportsman’s group then adjusted the resolution to recommend that the KDFWR take steps to ban fishing along portions of big lakes shorelines during coming crappie spawning seasons. The idea is to leave more spawning fish undisturbed, increasing the spawning success of existing fish to improve recruitment for future classes of crappie.

Rister said managers oppose the prospects of closing public areas, calling the potential gains insignificant in relation to the difficulties of arbitrarily closing certain areas and viewing the enforcement of any such closure uncertain at best.

Instead, Rister said he and other KDFWR managers would like to go concerned anglers one better and institute a program of stocking young crappie in a couple of select locations as an experiment toward improving crappie numbers.

The alternative proposal from the KDFWR is to gather 180 pairs of white crappie from the lakes, haul them to the agency’s Frankfort hatchery where they will be used to produce a controlled spawn this spring, Rister said. The young of those Kentucky-Barkley parent fish (keeping native genetics in line) will be raised to fingerling size, averaging about three inches, then trucked back to the big lakes in October and released, he said.

“This would be a kind of a trial, a three-year study to see what kind of results we can get,” Rister said. “We’re looking to stock a minimum of about 10 fingerlings per acre in Blood River on Kentucky and in the Little River arm on Barkley, two main fisheries.

“We expect we can produce about 30,000 young crappie per embayment with the use of six hatchery ponds,” he said. “This will cost an estimated $30,000-plus, so the hatchery cost will break down to about 50 cents per fingerling crappie.”

Rister said legal “keeper” size crappie, 10 inches on the sister lakes, typically are attained with three years of growth, so the first hatchery crop of fish would figure to become harvestable fish in 2012. He said managed crappie fishing tournaments of a sort would be hosted by the KDFWR then on Blood River and Little River to monitor the success of the stocking program.

While the fingerling crappie can’t be tagged to identify them as the hatchery fish, they will be treated with a chemical that give them an internal characteristic that will show their source, Rister said. Each treated crappie will bear an otolith, the middle ear bone, that will glow in the dark, setting them apart from naturally spawned crappie, he said.

“By being able to identify the stocked crappie caught, that will show us how well the stockings worked,” Rister said. “We can then figure whether stocking is an economically feasible alternative to helping us through the low spots in the crappie population cycle.

“Fishermen will have to consider how much the stocking helps their results and whether it’s worth paying the license dollars for,” Rister said. (The KDFWR operates not under general funding but almost wholly through the sales of sportsmen’s license and permits.)

While crappie fishing has been in decline in most recent seasons, chiefly because of changing conditions on the lakes, Rister has been expecting that anglers will experience a further downturn starting this year. Crappie sampling data shows that the fish have had poorer than normal spawns for the past three years on the big lakes.

As the leaner spawning class of 2006 this year takes its turn as the incoming new legal keepers, fishermen may note smaller numbers of these entry level 10-inch crappie, Rister said. And with sub-par year classes also coming into keeper size over the next two years, the downturn in population only is likely to become more evident.

Rister said fishing pressure on popular Kentucky-Barkley waters is heavy, but that isn’t the primary reason for the weakened crappie population.

“It’s more about how our lakes have adapted to drought conditions over the past seasons,” Rister said. “Drier springs and clearer water conditions are less favorable to crappie spawns.

“The conditions we’ve had in recent years have been more favorable to bass production than to crappie, and when we’ve got more bass, there’s more predation on small crappie and that sets them back even more,” he said.

The big lakes, long famous for crappie of quality in quantity, have always produced all their own crappie. Stocking crappie might have seemed a ridiculous prospect at one time because of the huge size of the lakes and the amount of stocked fish it would take to have an impact in waters already awash with crappie.

[FONT=Times New Roman][FONT=Verdana]Now, however, with crappie numbers in significant downturn because of environmental changes, several thousand young fish with a human-assisted start might just prove viable in carrying anglers through these tougher times.[/FONT] [/FONT]

[Tyme2fish]

Thanks for the post.

[the_donger]

That was interesting and informative. Thanks for the info.