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[sweetwater]

Forty-five degrees is about all a threadfin shad can take. I remember several times in Alabama when the temperature would fall dramatically there would be fairly large threadfin shad kills. That seemed to be especially true in northern Alabama on the Tennessee River but I saw several of the kills firsthand on the Coosa River. It would always be a good time to go jerkbait fishing.

[Moveon]

Forty-five degrees is about all a threadfin shad can take. I remember several times in Alabama when the temperature would fall dramatically there would be fairly large threadfin shad kills. That seemed to be especially true in northern Alabama on the Tennessee River but I saw several of the kills firsthand on the Coosa River. It would always be a good time to go jerkbait fishing.

Yea when I first posted this I had not read the entire article and failed to see that it was threadfin shad. But I did know that threadfin shad can't take the cold.

What got me was the guy saying that the dissolved oxygen in the shallows was what killed the fish. That I knew was FALSE. Colder water holds much more oxygen than warm water.

So it had to be the shock effect of the temperature changes. Water takes a while to gain or lose heat. So if the air suddenly cools down quickly the water takes a while to cool down. The specific heat of water is much greater than of air. So that's what caught my attention first.

Then after I posted I reread the article and saw it was threadfin Shad. They called it Threadfin Chad. I think the author was still thinking about the election of 2000 with the hanging Chads!

Now we don't have threadfin shad in our waters as we are too far North. I heard someone talk about threadfin shad being in Hovey's Lake at the Very Southern end of IN in Posey County. And it was said that they are found in the Ohio River in that area. But I've never seen them personally in that area. However I don't frequent that area much either. So I could not tell you if they are there or not.

But I do know that Southern Lakes have a longer growing season and more threadfin shad in their waters which makes the crappie grow faster and bigger. It seems that threadfin shad make a nice meal for a big crappie but the Gizzard shad quickly grow to big for the crappie to eat.

I wish that we have more threadfin shad in our lakes.

Now I've seen Gizzard shad that died when we had prolonged cold spells around here. I noticed the sea gulls landing on the lake near where the ice has melted in the middle of some very deep strip pits. Old coal mines. The water was open in the middle of the lake and the ice was still on the water in all the other areas. The dead fish were melting out of the ice where they had been caught in the ice somehow. And the Sea Gulls were walking on the edge of the ice and picking the gizzard shad out of the ice water interface and eating their fill. I never saw that before and found it interesting.

I'm guessing that the Threadfin shad are much more sensitive to quick changes in water temperature than I thought. I guess that cold front was colder than I thought and or lasted longer than I figured.

The article also said that there was an overpopulation of Threadfin Chad in this river. Sometimes when animal populations grow too large for the carrying capacity of the area they live in the population can crash due to different causes. Lack of food being a primary one. Disease being another reason. Disease can spread though a population much faster when the population is high.