Some folks on crappie.com think that by not targeting the male crappie on the nest during the crappie spring spawning event that there will be more crappie that grow to maturity in the lake.

But I think that there are so many crappie eggs and fry being born each and every year in any lake that taking the males off the nest really won't harm the crappie population in the next year or two. I really doubt that each and every male crappie guarding his nest of eggs or young fry is going to be taken by fishermen. Even if 50% of the males are taken off the nest there will still be millions of eggs and young fry that survive and reach 2 years old. Crappie are prolific spawners and the females lay hundreds of thousands of eggs each and every spring. Now not all of them survive even if we didn't fish the lake and remove crappie from the nests. They have other factors that will keep the young from growing up to maturity. Natural predators and rising/falling water levels probably kill more eggs/fly than anything else. Take lakes like KY lake where the water levels can vary considerably. What happens of the lake falls 10 ft or rises 10 ft. Fish eggs laid in 5 ft of water will be above the water level if the lake falls ten feet after the eggs are laid. And any eggs laid at ten ft depths before the water level rises another ten feet will be at 20 ft deep and may not get the amount of light to help the eggs develop. Crappie lay their eggs where they can be warmed by the sunlight and hatch properly at the right water temperature. We all know that the surface of the lake is warmer than the water at 20 ft deep. If the water is cloudy it can block the sunlight from reaching the depths also. So there are many other factors that effect the number of young crappie that make it to 2 year or 5 years old.

We have seen over the years that different classes of crappie do better than others. Studies have shown that some years produce better crappie generations. I personally think this is caused by the Corp of Engineers raising and lower the lake levels in the spring of the year to stop flooding. The Corp's job is to reduce flooding effects not to raise and lower the water levels to support the fish. That's just the way it is.

But still even with the tremendous pressure on the crappie each year at KY lake and other lakes the crappie manage to reproduce and have a new class of fish the next few years. That's because it may only take on crappie nest to produce hundreds of new fish. Imagine what 1000 nest can produce on any given lake.

When you clean your next female crappie try counting the eggs in her egg sac. LOL. There are hundreds of thousands of eggs in each female crappie. So each and ever nest has the potential of replenishing most all the crappie that were taking off the nests each spring.