tjm

You likely know the area better than I, haven't been too active for a few years and a lot of the access I once had is sold off to 'furriners' now. Pick a day and show me the secrets of Hickory?

Last activity they mention in the 'about us' is IGFA hair rig approval. Jan-Feb 2007?

You got me Chief, not even aware of either group til now. He said a relaunch, that to me indicates some interval of inactivity. What is MSA?

They been dead for how many years?

So, the felt wader stuff; I haven't read all the things about how that supposedly works and I should/shall, but in the mean time if the bad things are sticking to felt why aren't they sticking to clothing and sneakers of wet-waders? As to the trout in high remote lakes, many of the western trout waters had no trout before the stocking programs. About 1960 I asked how the trout got in a glacial lake on an Idaho mountain top and learned that fry were dropped from light aircraft, similar to crop dusting or fire fighting. People that told me this claimed to have been involved in such stockings. Also heard stories of pack horsing fry/fingerlings into remote areas. Been a while, but iirc, only the bull trout and cuts were native in the Rockies and Great basin. In that time and place I never heard the term "Brown trout", they were normally called "German trout" just as the carp was called "German Carp". Some place I met a guy that called them "von Behrs" or a similar German name.

Just noticed the "hi there" forum. Not much to tell, older guy that used to know a lot about fishing and fly tying .. I seem to know less each year and to forget a lot of that. You may find me at RRSP or in the Elk or Shoal Creek drainage, I might have fly rod in hand. Rarely stray past the three southwestern counties. So, hey y'all

Thought you said yourself that they didn't live well/reproduce in these streams? May be hard to believe but I think you are wrong about this because old people commented "where did them things come from?" and "I saw the biggest fish yesterday and don't know it was" It is true though that some NY politician got carp imported and stocked so his hatchery buddies could make money from the guberment. It is true that carp were widely stocked for many years, it is not true that carp were stocked in every body of water in the USA and like the other german the trout they were often stocked in places that they did not survive. The Mississippi is not actually even a concern of mine, whatever is right or wrong with it is the fault of several states so blame Minnesota and Illinois. I did read some place that Mississippi river commercial fishermen killed and sold a ton or two carp every year' Have fun with your campaign. And if you go after all tournaments, so that every fish put in the boat has to be killed and removed from the site for consumption, I be there to vote for that.

So are you against all tournament fishing? Or just when the method is not the one you chose?

nope had no idea, seriously don't care, a couple of Medalist is all the reel I have ever needed. When it comes to talking about the money in recreational fishing, tournament fishing and such like I am opposed to it all. So, you instantly lose my support for any of it. Though I do release most all catch, I truly believe in consumptive use. If that mulit dollar business was in sales of fish flesh, I might be on board. We could get rich exporting good carp bait to those places that already have the sort of fishing that you favor, and still have our waters as is . Texas is big enough to hold all the trophy carp that are needed in the entire universe. Carp are food, should leave it at that. Carp on flies fishermen indicate that crawdads are one of their favorite foods. Til you get some one at masters/doctorate level to study crawdads and carp devastation of them I will blame carp for the loss of my local mudbugs, we had 10# carp in this creek for 20-30 years, may still have, idk. Last one I saw caught (12#+) was on a crawdad about 15 years ago but I haven't fished it much since then to know.

hm. I don't recall ever seeing any native fish muddy up a flowing stream by rooting and I have seen carp do that many times. Those dumpster pictures are in Mo? I think our wanton waste regulation would prevent that, maybe not.

Stacking marbles. I don't know much about rocks and was unaware that chert slivers could be rounded quickly by tumbling. Have no idea what druse is. So maybe all this gravel is chert and or druse. A lot of it is very light in the hand though with a generally pinkish color. I had associated it with iron, because it looks rusted sometimes, good bit of it looks somewhat like pictures of pumice with holes,or cavities. The grandson found what he called a geode in my ditch, softer grey/pink somewhat rounded til he broke it and the inside looked like what I've heard called mozarkite.

Seriously, do some real and reasoned presentation illustrating your goals and a fully reasoned and supported defense of your position and take it to the universities that pass out those Biology Masters degrees and sell it to a couple of them.

We don't need to have more regulations, we don't need to fund a study of carp; let the grad students get grants and do thesis studies. Buffalo ain't carp, buffalo are native, buffalo and redhorse may be worthy of tax dollars spent on studies. Our crawdads definitely deserve money/study/fixing more and sooner than invasives of any color. Are some species of crawdads already lost? Are many of them endangered? Probably. What they do in germany or Japan or Minnesota does not have any application or bearing on what is good in Ozark waters. Carp rooting the bottom of high gradient streams may well be the primary factor in loss of crustaceans and the movement of gravel into the deep 'holes'.

Good news is that yesterday I saw a large crawdad, maybe 9" wing span. First in a long time.

I have one of the many dry waterways on my place, lots of run off after 6"+ rain of course, but dry looking most all the time; thing is there is water moving under the gravel on most of these ditches and streams all the time. There is some substrate that holds water from going deeper into the earth and it moves the gravel ever so slightly all the time, I know a branch that flows at both ends and has a half mile of dry gravel between. Creeks I'm familiar with seem to all be underlayed with stone with the gravel over it; often the gravel is almost floating on water that moves through it. In effect the gravel flows. Digging/dredging accelerates the flow, as an example, a neighbor excavated a 1/4 mile of the dry ditch and straightened it some what many years ago; over the next several months my portion of the ditch became noticeably deeper even with no rains that caused runoff. I saw a mining operation set in one spot for about 40 years that never ran short of new gravel. I'm sure it would still be there if the divorce had not ended in selling off the equipment and land. Dams tend to stabilize the stream of gravel above them, I think, by stopping or slowing the flow of gravel as well as by slowing the runoff during floods. An observation on the erosion of the hills causing the gravel in the creek, My hill gravel is all sharp and is mostly chert of some sort and all most creek gravel is well rounded soft rock. I have never found a sea shell fossil in any of the hill rock, but, see many "scallop" fossils in the ditch rocks. All the dry ditches hereabouts are several feet deeper than they were even 30 years ago. The one at my house is no wider than it was 50 years ago but is at least 4' deeper than it was then. These bottoms are also loaded with 'sharp gravel' to the extent that some fields would look like solid gravel after being plowed, back in the days when they still farmed it.

Didn't I read that carp eat their own eggs and larvae to the point of being self regulating? I have wondered if they consumed all the mussels and crayfish babies, maybe? Rainbow trout are just as non native as the carp ain't they? Do carp successfully spawn in the Ozark streams with the fast flow and little vegetation?

Whatever happened to this great idea?

I'm not sure that the gravel infill either helps or harms over the long term, it has been happening a long long time, that's part of the karst geology as I understand it; most of the gravel is sucked into the streams from hilltop sink holes, isn't it? There are sink holes where there were none fifty years ago and more numerous holes where they were back when, do the hundreds of earth tremors that we experience each year have something to do with this? I own about a quarter mile of limestone bluff and the leaching of minerals/formation of stalactites etc. is visually obvious over time, how does this chemically affect the streams? When I look at a creek and see no mounds of mussel shells, no hellgrammites , no numbers of crayfish I don't expect to see numbers of large fish and I don't believe catch and release will improve the food base. I suspect that over a long period the catch and release and the size limits won't make a real difference. During the last sixty, or perhaps the last thirty, years (or maybe this is a thousand year trend) there has been some change in the water chemistry that is harming the life forms? Frogs, there are more in my yard and field than on the creek and I've not heard a bull frog in decades. So is it unnatural that selection that predators are adapting to a less bountiful prey base?

Not enough access for new Americans to do any harm, city parks and the few MDC access points don't have much effect on the streams as whole, mostly they only benefit the folks wealthy enough to go boating. No public access on Little Sugar. But golf grass isn't the only source of nutrient, there is a zillion acres of fescue that was not here at all before 1970. In your search for bait did you see many madtoms or sculpin? I don't do as much as I once did but my limited searches show them scarce also.

I believe the crawdad loss is for reasons other than rocks and gravel, saw some odd looking crayfish in the '90s for a few years and then near none since. I suspect exotics took over then eventually died out, no proof. Think Indian Creek still holds good numbers of crawdads, it did a few years ago. It doesn't flow from Ar or a golf course either and that may make a difference. My point was, is there evidence that those streams can support a great number of larger fish? Won't the predators outnumber the prey at some point? I have fished, waded, swam in the two sugar creeks since the mid '50s and I see probably ten times fewer fishermen on the whole drainage than there were back when. More floaters on the Elk/Cowskin, but really few fishers and they mostly go back where they came from after the weekend, imo, any loss of fish quality/size / quantity is unrelated to the consumption. I grew up with stories of seining those streams with hog wire and two teams of horses, hauling a wagon load of fish at a time; the old ones didn't fish for sport. Heard anecdotes of hand catching cats over fifty pounds out of those creeks too. It may be our modern methods keep us from seeing the real big fish or that mans desire for green grass is killing the streams' historic character.

Did anyone keep records of the prey species available to stream predators in the 19th or 20th centuries, when the fish reportedly grew so large? My mind tells me that there were lots more crawdads in the Elk River tributaries in the '50s than there are now, I believe there were lots more crawdads in the '80s than there are now. Where as a small boy I caught scads of crawdads and even my kids caught some, I don't recall seeing any in several years. I'm sure there are still some there, but so few that they aren't usually seen.

See, they kept turning the little ones loose and ate (or mounted) all the big gene pool. It's easy to see why all we got now is fiddlers, that is all our predecessors let go. Blame Mark Twain and his buddies for all the small fish left nowadays. Never read about the guy guy that caught 100# plus fish and turned it loose to reproduce, nope they mounted all them genetics.

I've always said that limits should be set to a maximum size to keep. Say no keeper small mouth over 15" or whatever. The keeping of the biggest fish hurts in a couple ways. We are removing both the eligible brood stock and the genetics required to grow that big. Keeping only small fish removes the runt genes and utilizes fish that would normally be eaten by the lunkers that some one now has mounted on a wall, releasing small fish only increases the probability that the small fish genes will be passed on. Once was a 4 1/4# brown in my little creek that over a three year time I caught and released over fifty times, one day I watched as a fellow caught her and and kept her on a stringer in hot sunshine where she was looking unfit to eat by the time he left the area a few hours later. The same group threw back several of those 11 1/2" fish that will never get any bigger than 11 1/2" due to genetics. All according to law, but she will never spawn again. My thoughts are that trophy fishermen deserve to ruin our fisheries, they spend the big bucks to so, and that the agencies involved in setting size limits want smaller fish.

I thought walleye were nonnative, I have read that some place in the past?

And the gravel guards really work? I've looked at those in the last couple years and been skeptical that they would stay down when the gravel runs over shoe top deep. I never liked having to deal with all the hassle of putting on and taking off multiple pieces two or three times a day either when jumping from one spot to another, either. Cabelas lists a lot of different options in the catalog but the store near me sure don't stock much. How do those booty foots go by shoe size are the feet stretchy or do you wad the extra up? Guess I need to make a point to look closer at them, mostly been just looking for a boot foot that would fit me half way. Currently in pvc and oversized sneakers, but that is meant to be temporary.