Tim Smith

Finally a fishing show I can actually watch!!

Handguns when fishing? Hmm. Lures usually work better. When I'm relaxing at home I usually keep a couple of guns around but when I'm showering I'll throw caution to the wind and just hold the one. I've never been attacked in the shower so that seems to be working out fine.

Sand County Almanac (Wisconsin, not Iowa, but the same geology) and Aldo Leopold made those native driftless brook trout immortal for me. Great blog post. ...the browns...eh... A few years ago I helped the IDNR shock an ag stream in NW Illinois in the driftless. We turned up a brown trout in the middle of that channelized mess...bit of a surprise to find them since there was no stocking program for them in Illinois and the habitat was only fair. They're in to stay.

Bump.

That's apparently true. They've completely changed nutrient cycling dynamics in North American forests. http://www.nrri.umn.edu/worms/forest/index.html

No, J.D. Your tag line introduced politics into the thread. No matter what side it supports, your tagline is completely political and it's out of context on the forum. Phil has been very clear that he will tolerate topics with political overtones but he's not interested in having his forum become a platform for one candidate or another or one party or another. If you want to go down that road, that's your call but you're going there without me.

Shad need a certain sized system to really get established. Once they have good open water habitat, they're pretty dangerous in a lake as they can get out of hand. If you want more baitfish, let the aquatic veg fill in a bit. If you can get about 20% coverage, you should have enough refuge to let the juvenile bluegill hang around long enough to provide a forage base. Haris, that is a unique use of those enclosures. Even small ones like you're describing might be of some use. You can get really high densities of juvenile bluegill inside vegetated habitat. I'd really be curious to see data from those systems. It's an idea I've wondered about and if it were cost effective, it might be one that would be worthwhile in other systems.

Ha. You're baiting me. Fishing, aquatics and conservation only on this forum.

...and those were from Europe before they were from Candada. Aside from the political poo in his tag line, J.D. has it right. Don't release minnows unless you caught them in the watershed where you are fishing.

In my experience, golden shiners and fathead minnows are often the preferred bait minnow species. If you're buying a "big" minnow it's probably a golden shiner. Al's right about goldfish vs. carp. Goldfish rarely become a problem and you don't find them in numbers unless a system is badly polluted or has severe oxygen problems. However, when you go to a bait distributor and you see how sloppy things tend to be and when you consider that the bait sellers don't usually have a clue what species of fish they are selling, the potential for new species to slip in is pretty high. You're probably right to be concerned about carp. Their larvae sometimes are pumped up into rearing ponds (amazing that they can survive that, but they regularly do) and if they are taken at a young age it would be hard to pick the few carp out of the hundreds of thousands or millions of minnows being shipped out for sale. They do tend to grow very rapidly at young ages so the fish farmer would be able to pick them out if they are more than a month old.

I've had similar thoughts and seen efforts with pike and muskie to achieve similar results but I've never seen this tried in a scientific way with flatheads. Kayser, do you know of any data to support this approach? It makes sense that it would work...but I also know that the east coast states think flathead are a pest species so I'm going to hold on to my skepticism until I see numbers.

I have to admit I did pretty well there too...and I think the key was being in a canoe. All the fish I saw caught when I was there were from a boat, not the shore. The walking strategy you mention here and avoiding well known spots seems to be the best strategy I've seen... ...and to that end I almost started posting here with a complete denial that there were any fish in CO at all. Fame is a death knell for a fishery.

The fishing is great there, but you're more optimistic than me. You'll almost never be the first person to present a fly to fish on the Big Thompson on a given day in season but the fish seem reasonably willing despite that. I don't notice many people fishing Dream Lake when I go that way, but the Loch gets high pressure and Lily Lake is just plain ridiculous....like fishing in a parking lot. But yes, there are plenty of locations up the trails in RMNP where you won't find many anglers.

Prey selection is a pretty complicated topic. Fish defintely select habitats and develop search images with particular prey in mind. How long those patterns last and how quickly they switch to new patterns is still open for debate (at least it is as far as I know, I haven't looked at the scientific literature on this topic in quite a while). There's a notion that fish will try to forage "optimally" and maximize their intake of calories per unit time. That assumes the fish are aware of their options and able to percieve them in a way they can exploit them. Things like the risk of being eaten themselves or the level of predator hunger weigh in and affect the way fish choose how and where and what to eat. It does seem pretty clear that if you're in a lake where the dominant forage is crayfish (for instance), you're better off selecting baits that resemble crayfish in some way. It also seems clear that if you're in a lake where there are limited numbers of forage fish, the predator fish are pretty desperate and they'll jump anything that moves. I'd be curious to learn more about any systems that were using fencing for prey refuge. In my own experience, I've only used fencing to protect newly planted water plants from water fowl.

The Chinese aren't the only ones processing Asian Carp. They might be the only ones with access to a domestic market who will pay a premium for them rather than grinding them into fishmeal. I'd be interested to know more about this.

Quick follow up on the flyfishing angle. Don't let the gear differences hold you back. The Illinois Smallmouth Alliance has a flyfishing wing, Bass Buggers, that operates under the auspicies of the ISA. They are huge contributors to the overall group. You need members, manpower and money to get this thing off the ground to a level it can survive over the years...and hopefully make a positive contribution. A cooperative group will get you miles down that road and clearly, the AFF has already proven they are productive group. There are plenty of ways to incorporate both fly fishing and spin casting preferences into an Alliance.

Funny stuff. But you know, there really is money to be made in a good kayak hand cart or trolley. These mountain lakes in Colorado are begging to be fished by kayak (I will NOT buy a belly boat). If there were a way to drag a kayak along the trail with a reasonable set of wheels on the back, I'd be all over that. A six mile walk carrying a kayak isn't going to happen, but I could pull a cart that far.

Good question. In general, forage issues are a lower priority for lake managers. Even if no forage species are available, a fishery can often persist on cannibalism and terrestrial forage (although that's usually far less than ideal for bass growth). There are often higher pay-offs for stocking effort than fooling around with forage fish. You put your finger on the key issue when you mentioned the need to keep the forage in the system. Very high quality forage is full of fat and protein relative to body weight, but many of the species that fit this description don't do well when large predators like bass are also abundant. The expense of stocking forage that will all immediately be eaten is prohibitive (although ironically many of the quality bass fisheries in California are fueled in part by consumption of stocked rainbow trout). So for the MDC or any conservation agency to bother with forage stocking, they need something that will reproduce effectively in a system with predators before they're all eaten, but not be so resistant to predators that they don't end up competing with the predators or eating their juveniles. It's a tricky prospect because to do forage introductions well, the goal is a long term (permanent) introduction to the food web. Bluegill or bluegill hybrids are typically the forage species of choice. They are not ideal for growth of bass as they are spiny with less energy content, they can at least avoid the bass well enough to stay in the system and produce a sustainable forage base. These systems have to be kept in balance or they can end up with many small bluegill and only a very few large bass (the bluegill eat and outcompete the bass juveniles), or a few very large bluegill and many small bass. Gizzard shad have been stocked for forage in the past but that's usually a big mistake. They have a high energy content and produce good bass growth but they can get out of control and crush the zooplankton populations in lakes. That impairs survival of almost all larval fish and eventually harms the fishery. Threadfin shad never grow to a size that escapes predators so they're less of a problem, but they normally can't overwinter unless a heat source like a power plant discharge is on the lake. Minnows will occasionally establish in a lake but it's pretty hit or miss and many species just can't sustain themselves (especially in small systems) in the presence of bass. One sucker species that can persist in a system with bass and has been looked at closely as an alternative forage is the lake chubsucker. They reach a larger size as adults and have a high energy content and produce faster growth in bass than bluegill. That particular idea hasn't been used very often. I'm not sure why, exactly. One indirect way to manage forage is to manage refuge for forage. The best way to do that is to keep about 20% to 30% of a lake vegetated with a high quality submersed aquatic plant (such as coontail or Val).

Yes, that's true. But I don't think the Central American products have conformed to that standard yet. Don't know what their performance would be if they had to meet emission standards (and having lived in the Central Valley of California as well as Central America, I can say they SHOULD meet those standards...that is some nasty air out there in CA). Those trucks are marvelous beasts though.

The Toyota Hi-Lux diesel truck and the Ford Ranger Turbo Diesel sold in Central America are amazing vehicles with great power and they both get over 25mpg...up in the 28 range and over. They blow away most of the light trucks sold in the US for durability and performance. I assume they have the same old diesel problems with sulfur and nitrogen emissions.

Ok. Haven't heard from you so I'll go ahead and post this. The Arkansas Smallmouth Alliance and the Arkansas Fly Fishers have been operating under the same umbrella for quite some time. When I contacted them in 2008 the head of the group at that time was William McMillan. They were open to splitting off a separate ASA or working with it. AFF still has an active web page. http://arkansasflyfishers.com/ I don't know these people or work with these people but it's pretty clear there is already an Arkansas Smallmouth Alliance. You'd do well to talk to them.

Very best of luck to you. There was historically an Arkansas Smallmouth Alliance, potent enough to be mentioned in an NFWF grant from 2007 for habitat improvement on the Caddo River. I spoke to these people at one point and they seemed approachable, but perhaps not especially active. Don't really remember much about them. EDIT: I have the contacts. If you're interested, PM me. http://www.nfwf.org/...&CONTENTID=5784

Can you say "conflict of interest"? How can you sit on the board of a gas exploration company and expect to evaluate your industry's environmental performance using public funds?? http://news.sciencem...ized-for-a.html Groat defends himself thusly: ... ...no meaningful purpose? I am sure there are employees who would write a report that might damage their boss' business. Mostly fired ones. UT should be forced to give back the money for the study.

Those are some really tempting little cripples to pick off here at the end, but I do believe our host has made it clear that his patience has been used up. Apologies for for my parting shot, Lilley. I'm done on this thread.

My personal bet here is schizophrenia. It just pops up in people about this guy's age. You can go into his brain and look at the symptoms and there's no way to fake it. Maybe schizophrenics should be expected to make the voices in their head toe a moral line, but those voices are not something people make up. They hear them because they're sick. But it's too early for all that. Time will tell.