Outside Bend

Really? I think the Little Piney and Mill Creek are two prime examples why folks should cough up and buy the $7 stamp. Bohegan CA on Mill Creek was purchased with trout funds, and has opened up much more of that stream to the public. The fund has helped to pay for stream revetments and other erosion-control structures. It has also paid for artificial structures to increase fish habitat and holding areas on Mill Creek. When MDC biologists sample those streams, their pay is coming from trout program funds. Again, the money isn't used solely for stocking. Although those streams are managed as wild fisheries, they're still benefiting from the funds.

If you haven't checked out Onandoga Cave State Park before, you may want to plan a float around that area. The river there is pretty scenic, decent fishing, and weekday crowds probably won't be an issue. Plus the state park is worth a spending a few hours in, and it's one of the few caves which will remain open to the public for a while. Have fun, always a great thing to take a kid out! : )

Cool photos, glad to see the water was in good shape and that you had fun!

If I had someone willing to mow my lawns and trim my weeds for free, I'd jump on it too... And to be fair, a water bottle and a cheap handkerchief isn't all that far from what some of the MDC biologists and technicians make

The locals cut up the trout for bait...or the fly fishermen?!

Aside from fencing cattle from streams, managing overgrazed and high-graded woodlands through burning and TSI, maintaining dead snags, planting shortleaf pine, hard and soft mast trees and shrubs for wildlife, eliminating non-native trees, converting fescue pasture to warm-season grasses, edge feathering, letting fencelines grown up, putting up wood duck and bluebird boxes, conservative haying to protect nesting turkeys, helping neighbors work on their riparian and erosion control efforts, investing time and money with a couple different Stream Teams, the Conservation Federation, FFF, TU, and others, I don't do anything for conservation. It's great if you have the time, money, property, and resources to implement conservation practices, but it has nothing to do with the point I was making. Missouri's trout program requires a fair bit of money. The trout stamp is designed to generate that money. If you use the state's trout program, if you appreciate the state's trout program, if you'd like to see the same caliber of trout fishing in the future...perhaps you should help pay for the state's trout program, regardless of whether or not you're keeping fish, or fishing where and when a stamp is required. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone to pay for what they use; I guess that's just me, though.

Go. You won't melt

Can anyone offer a compelling reason not to buy a trout stamp if you intend to fish for trout? To me, "it's not legally required," or "I don't have to," just don't jive. I think Eric does make a valid point- if you use a resource but don't pay for it, it's freeloading, plain and simple. Maybe that's harsh. Maybe he just struck a nerve with some folks. Regardless, I think it's still true. No, I don't HAVE to pay into the breakroom coffee fund. It's not a legal obligation. But I know I tend to disdain the guy who wants a free ride, and if I'm gonna be using the coffee, my friends and coworkers would sure appreciate if I pitched in my fair share. I don't eat MO trout- hatchery fish taste like the Purina pellets they eat, and I think wild fish are too valuable to be creeled. I still buy the permit though, because I know its revenue is used to fund the trout program. Not just stocking and hatchery improvements (which are important in and of themselves), but habitat improvement (erosion control on Mill Creek, installing logs, boulders, and structure at Meramec and Montauk, maintaining accesses on the North Fork of the White and Meramec, funding the urban trout program, etc. If it weren't for folks paying into the system, those services couldn't be provided, and I think our state's coldwater resources would be poorer for it. It ain't too much for me to pay, many times less than the expenses of gas or gear it takes for me to make it to a Missouri trout stream. And it goes to a cause which benefits both myself and other anglers, present and future. To me, that's worth paying into.

I think you guys are overlooking the real issue here: if there was a live videostream of Crane Creek online, would you still be seeing those worm boxes?

I have to agree about the misidentification issue; I think it's generally overstated. If you're going to creel fish without positively knowing their identification, and get busted for it...that's no one's fault but your own.

I've had them before; they're pretty good fried or smoked. The bones can be a pain, but there's a way to clean them which reduces the amount of bone in the fillet, and whatever bones remain are so large they're easy to pick out. And they're planktivores, so contamination isn't as big an issue with them as with other large-river species such as catfish, sturgeon, and walleye/sauger. There were some folks trying to grind them up and sell them as fish sticks, but "silver carp sticks," isn't a name which seems to spur American consumers into buying a product. That may be overcome, orange roughy was once termed "slimehead." One of the crazy things is bighead and silver carp populations are crashing in some parts of Asia, due to overfishing and habitat degradation. I've heard of folks catching them on white clousers, deceivers, etc when they congregate in moderate- and smaller streams for spawning. Yep, they do.

I guess I don't understand why we can ban chip mills in the Ozarks because of unethical business practices and environmental damage, but we can't do the same for gas fracking. It seems as though the same logic would apply to this situation.

Your handle is "Ozark Trout Fisher," and you're worried about preserving a fisheries' historic/natural character? Nothing personal, it just seems like there's an awful lot of irony in that. Most Ozark streams will never be what they were "originally." It's unlikely they'll even be very similar to what they once were. There's been to many changes to aquatic habitat (eg gravel vs. bedrock), hydrology (lower water table, change in water flow due to impoundments), and land use (conversion of forest to pasture, change in forest types). Largemouth, smallmouth, spotted bass and other species have been introduced to streams they were never native to, and different stocks of smallmouth have been stocked on top of each other, polluting gene pools which were adapted to specific Ozark streams. Fish composition in many streams has shifted from suckers, catfish, and others to black bass (they receive more protection). It's no longer a pristine system, and to me expecting it to return to something "natural," is a pipe dream. To me, humans are just as much a part of the equation now as anything, and if the fishery can be managed to make the greatest amount of people happy (without compromising the resource), I think that's the way it ought to be managed.

There's been some talk of using pheremones to attract them, as well as genetically engineering some fish to where they'll only produce males, or so they'll die before becoming sexually mature. Frankenstein stuff, but pretty cool. I think one of the major problems with control currently is that there aren't many effective ways for catching them efficiently, or harvesting them on a large scale. They tend to jump over nets, and what fish are capture quickly destroy that tackle.

I couldn't tell you their specific management objectives, but usually their management goals are related to catch per unit effort (CPUE, electrofishing something like 100 fish over 12" per hour, for example), or a proportion of the stock of a given size (eg. 25% of the population over 12") So long as those management objectives are being maintained you'll have the status quo- so long as people aren't clamoring for better fishing. And there's a lot more for those folks to manage than smallmouth. You may have a half-dozen fisheries guys spread over a ten or twelve county area, sampling and managing both public and private waters. Add to that the difficulties of a job requiring decent weather and river conditions, and it can be a overwhelming at times. Should MDC folks spend more time on stream smallmouth? Probably, I at least think so. Are there some folks in the Department that could be more productive? Absolutely. But on the whole I think they get a fair amount done with what they have.

Closest bet would be Meramec or some of the small wild trout streams around Rolla. Really that's about it. There's some pretty good warmwater fishing around there, though. Smallmouth, largemouth, white bass, carp, and all sorts of panfish.

I wouldn't go as far as to say the MDC folks aren't managing anything. They still do population monitoring, watch trends, assess growth and population dynamics, etc. They're just managing for a different goal than MSA and the folks on here advocate, at the moment. I'm sure that can change though, given enough encouragement and public will.

Good stuff, I've been wondering how it's fishing.

He sort of has a point, though. For the price of a half-dozen of those size sixteen caddises you could be help paying for stocking, area maintenance, habitat enhancement, stream restoration, and protection of the state's limited coldwater resources. To me, it's worth 7 bucks.

That's not a piranha, it's a tigerfish. They're native to Africa, while piranhas are native to South America. Still a big nasty fish, though. Piranhas turn up every now and again in LOZ, just like they turn up every now and again in other MO waters. People dump their pets when they get too big for an aquarium, or too expensive to keep feeding. It's not a self-sustaining population, though.

I agree completely...but I'm not going to hold my breath

As long as we're passing out blame, there's a lot of enforcement issues around the Rolla area, due in part to the folks at Ft. Leonard Wood not doing their homework before heading out to the stream. To me, the immigrants generate no more trash and are no more of a problem than a few of the locals who have been there for generations.

I know you said you didn't tie, but if you're looking mostly for midges and scuds, you really ought to look into it. Most of those patterns are pretty basic, and the materials are pretty cheap and easy to obtain. If you can tie your shoes, you can tie those flies OR you could talk to some local tiers and work out a custom-order deal, as well.

I hate to be the one defending oil companies, but do you really expect them to operate at a loss so you can afford a tank of gas? Did you expect they wouldn't try to recoup their losses?

Paddlefish have pretty enormous mouths too, that doesn't really mean anything. If you have to maintain a large body eating itty-bitty little food items, it pays to have a big gaper. I've heard of folks taking them on tackle, I'm not sure if they get aggressive during spawning season or what. The way it was explained to me, bigheads have a series of very fine gill rakers (like paddlefish), which act as seives to filter out plankton. Silver carp's gill rakers are more like sponges, filtering out water and leaving the plankton behind. Most native fish can filter plankton down to 5-6 microns, while these invasive carp can filter everything down to 3-4 microns, effectively undercutting the native fishes' food supply. Would you mind sharing the Meramec data? I'm just curious to see what it shows.