FishnDave

Koi: Goldfish:

Smallmouth Bass: Rock Bass: Ozark Sculpin:

For those that didn't know... Yeungling is now sold in Missouri!

Warmouth: Red Eared Slider: Bowfin Skull:

Common Carp: A new species for me...Spotted Gar:

Golden Shiner: Green Sunfish: Bowfin:

I've put off starting this thread for awhile. But here it is. Some pics I may have posted in other threads, but I'll try not to double post too many. Rainbow Trout & Largemouth Bass: Black Crappie: White Crappie: Creek Chub:

@Ham is doing great with his fly rod goals! Nipping at my heels currently, and I've no doubt he will pass me soon enough, on 2023 Fly AND Lifetime Fly numbers!

🙉 🙈 🙉 🙈 🙉 🙈 🙉 🙈

Nice fish! Yeah, I feel like I'm near ground zero for blue cats...but I've got this strange affliction where I want to catch one on a fly rod/fly...out of a stream smaller than the big Mississippi or Missouri Rivers. Those huge rivers intimidate me for some reason. Side channels and tributaries would be fine.

I just needed Redbreast, Spotted, and Northern sunfishes to complete my Lepomis list. So...I may choose to ignore this. 😜

Sounds like Maryland is the new place to go to catch Blue Cats! Drat. I was hoping to catch 'em around HERE! 😬

A river/ocean system seems "open", and the saltwater species can leave the river completely. Blue cats are saline-tolerant up to a point, but aren't fully saltwater fish, of course. A closed system like Lakes Marion & Moultrie (Santee Cooper Reservoir), since the dam's completion in 1941, has long been a world-class fishery for both Striped Bass AND Blue Catfish. Right? So they can live together. Elsewhere, I read that in the Chesapeake Bay tribs, Blue Cats now make up 70% of the biomass. If true, they will likely be forced to become cannabalistic and find their own population balance soon enough.

I don't know how to feel about that. Its kinda good...kinda shifty. Could save your life, could diminish your privacy.

I'm not a gambler. The problem certainly lies largely with us. As long as humans have been on the earth, we've been moving plants and animals from place to place around the planet. I feel like in some instances there has been more fear mongering than serious threats. Certainly there are some truly terrifying invasives.... like Wild Parsnip. Somewhere, apparently that stuff grows naturally and somehow(?) wasn't a problem? Sometimes the introductions of non-natives have been accidental, sometimes intentional. Corn originated in Mexico, right? Soybeans from China. Cattle from the Middle East/Eastern Europe. Apples from Central Asia. Chickens from Southeast Asia and Oceana. Birmingham Roller Pigeons are from England. What else has been shown to move species around? Natural occurrences such as floods, birds, wind, currents, temperature changes, time... Blue Catfish are native to this continent, just not those particular waters. In the waters where Blue Catfish have been since before there were humans on this continent.... other species of fish continue to survive. The concern in the article (where the blog's author's STATED PURPOSE is to INCITE) is mainly regarding the unproven/unstudied effects on Striped Bass. We've moved those around too. We've introduced them to some waters where Blue Catfish are native. Are the catfish guys complaining about the Striped Bass suddenly eating all the baby Blue Cats? I dunno. We have tried and continue to try to fix non-native species introductions. Eradication of the non-natives hasn't happened in most (all?) cases. I don't have any answers. What should we do?

https://www.in-fisherman.com/editorial/super-bass-aka-snakeheads/378545 “Through researching and reading about snakeheads, I eventually came across work done by John Odenkirk, a fishery biologist at the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. In reading his work and the work of others, I quickly discovered that all the published scientific studies done by fishery biologists in the U.S. didn’t demonstrate any invasive impact to native species from snakeheads. “Contrary to early fears, largemouth bass hadn’t decreased in number since the introduction of snakeheads. They had increased in number since snakeheads arrived in the Potomac and its tributaries. The prey species of northern snakehead, like banded killifish, hadn’t decreased either. They had also increased. Clearly, this didn’t match the media headlines that heralded the end of our native species in the jaws of the infamous snakehead fish.

"No direct scientific link has yet been established between catfish predation and declines in important fish species in rivers flowing into the Bay. " Are we looking for a scapegoat, rather than addressing the real problems? The article talks about politics and funding. "At a time when striped bass recruitment is dismayingly low, a time when a changing climate may be making the Chesapeake watershed less likely to produce big year classes of bass, the last thing that we or the striped bass need is additional stress on the resource, whether that stress comes from increased recreational landings or from an increasing population of invasive, predatory blue catfish."

Eggstacy is the real deal. Koi are finicky, picky, intellects. I've been using microjigs with rabbit fur tail and Eggstacy body lately...they love it! So do the Goldfish. Here's a few of them:

I liked that Virgil Ward apparently didn't bother editing out all the times he'd cast his lures up into trees. 😅

I still maintain a blog (not sure for how much longer), and I still put my fishing pics on Instagram. Both serve to help me remember what happened and when. https://fishndave.blogspot.com/ https://www.instagram.com/fishndave68/

Heck yeah! I LOVE people that ONLY fish on Opening Day! 😁

What's it typically look like? I've never been there.

Are you thinking of Striped Bass spawning requirements in freshwater? Walleyes have been successfully spawning in many lakes without major triubutaries since time immemorial, right?