Quote Originally Posted by Dave Stewart View Post
In a Facebook post yesterday, KDFWR released this statement:

It appears that young Asian Carp are succumbing to stressors brought on by insufficient fat storage to get the fish through the winter and spring months. Young but large carp are likely most vulnerable to starvation after a warm winter because the fishes’ metabolism was elevated above that of a normal, colder winter. Because of malnutrition, the fish eventually succumb to secondary stressors such as bacterial infections, which their immune systems would normally fight off. Thanks to our Fisheries biologists and partner the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for their diligent investigation
This is exactly what I thought was happening. They overpopulated and ran out of enough food for all of their massive numbers. This is typical of animal populations that grow out of control from natural predators. They grow in numbers and size until the exceed the carrying capacity of the lake they are in or the land that they occupy and then there is a massive die off from secondary diseases caused by starvation

Deer and Wolf Population on Isle Royal were studied. I was taught this in my wildlife biology classes and my ecology and zoology classes in college. And an environmental scientist student I was free to pick my classes and design my own field of study along with my advisor and I wanted to study some wildlife biology. I took classes in Limnology and Ichthyology as well as Oceanography, geology both historical and physical, Chemistry, physics, Evolution, ecology and microbiology as well as a few other type of science classes. There was this paper back book that we had to read about animal populations and I found that hard to put back down once I started reading it. It was full of shorter stories about population studies that various wildlife biology professors and students had conducted and written papers on.

Nature is cyclic. Lemmings and Snowy Owls and predatory cats are typical predator/prey relationship that are very cyclic. You can plot the numbers on a graph and one animal (prey) graph will rise and fall in numbers and the predator populations will lag being prey graph. Fish are not much different and have to live within the laws of nature just as mammals and other animals do.