How Light Affects Fish

[kentuckykingfisher]

Always enjoy your posts. Good read

[jcb]

Same here, Bonefish. Much thanks for all your insightful posts.

[bigwormy]

I will add, I just finished well in tourney and my biggest fish were caught in the heat of the day, VERY shallow, in the shade.

[Bonefish]

I will add, I just finished well in tourney and my biggest fish were caught in the heat of the day, VERY shallow, in the shade.

Those big fish will surprise you sometimes where they find to lay.

[Moveon]

Are you a biology major? I loved biology in school. It was my favorite subject in HS and College.

You touched on the phytoplankton a bit but I'd like to know more about how the zoo plankton and phytoplankton respond to changing light conditions.

Remember that green leafy submergent plants produce the most oxygen during the brightest times of the day. So there is a lot of Dissolved Oxygen being given off by these submerged plants in the hot summer months. Shallow water also gets more oxygen from the air especially along a windward shoreline with lots of wave action. I think that maybe the waves increase the surface area and allow more oxygen to go from the air into the water by osmosis.

During the summer months in the middle of the day I'm seeing a whole lot of fish suspended out over the deepest parts of the lake I fish. This lake or old strip pit is about 60 something feet deep at the deepest basin. This area is quite large too. These fish are suspending at about 15 to 35 feet down from the surface over 60 ft of water. I see a lot of fish down even at 40 ft and wonder if there is a thermocline or not? Maybe these are catfish or carp that don't require a lot of dissolved oxygen and can live in the thermocline or below it for a time? I'm not really sure what they are. But I know that trolling a bandit 200 crank bait with 200 or 190 ft of ten pound test Stren Mono out will catch a nice 2.5 lb bass or two. And I've caught some nice 9 and 10 inch bluegills. I also will catch some nice crappie and bass along the drops off in the deeper water. These crappie are suspended down around 12 to 15 ft and over 30 ft of water which is near a feeding shelf that extends out from the shoreline about 50 yards and is about 7 to 8 ft deep before it drops down into the deeper waters. The submerged weeds stop growing at around 7 to 8 ft deep due to the turbidity of the water. There is a lot of algae in the water and the shoreline is full of green algae that grows on the surface.

Also the deeper water is full of something that shows up clearly on the Humminbird 898 C SI unit around 28 ft deep all the way down to the bottom in 60 ft of water. This is when using Max mode and lessening the filter and noise settings to min. Increasing the sensitivity makes even more debris show up on the sonar 2d and down imaging screens.