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Posted

Largemouth bass run from 2 to 7 days.

Smallmouth from 3 to 6 days.

Most of our other favorite species run about the same.

Trout 21 days.

I wonder why the hugh difference.

Chief Grey Bear

Living is dangerous to your health

Owner Ozark Fishing Expeditions

Co-Owner, Chief Executive Product Development Team Jerm Werm

Executive Pro Staff Team Agnew

Executive Pro Staff Paul Dallas Productions

Executive Pro Staff Team Heddon, River Division

Chief Primary Consultant Missouri Smallmouth Alliance

Executive Vice President Ronnie Moore Outdoors

Posted

Maybe the colder water ? My guess

Dennis Boothe

Joplin Mo.

For a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing

in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."

~ Winston Churchill ~

Posted

What gets me is that nature is allowing the eggs to be vulnerable to predators for such a long period of time.

Chief Grey Bear

Living is dangerous to your health

Owner Ozark Fishing Expeditions

Co-Owner, Chief Executive Product Development Team Jerm Werm

Executive Pro Staff Team Agnew

Executive Pro Staff Paul Dallas Productions

Executive Pro Staff Team Heddon, River Division

Chief Primary Consultant Missouri Smallmouth Alliance

Executive Vice President Ronnie Moore Outdoors

Posted

What gets me is that nature is allowing the eggs to be vulnerable to predators for such a long period of time.

quantity over quality I guess.

everything in this post is purely opinion and is said to annoy you.

Posted

Trout are born with yolk sacs like all salmonides and are pretty well crippled till it is absorbed. The others are born fully developed and lack the yolk sac, they are mobile quicker. You would think with the longer incubation time, they would function the opposite way.

"Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously."

— Hunter S. Thompson

Posted

Chief, are you talking about the period the eggs are "running" out of the female adult fish or the time it takes for the eggs to eye-up or go to larval stage? Since the title is "incubation" I'm guessing you mean egg development.

Sometimes fish don't have a huge range of choices about things like incubation time. Salmonids and centrarchids aren't closely related and it may be that these species have just inhereted a physiological range of possible incubation times from their ancestors. Maybe they're just doing the best they can inside that range. There may be nothing adaptive about those traits at all.

If there were an adaptationist angle in play here, I agree that effects of temperature are most likely to drive those differences. Salmonids tend to lay during colder months when physiological demand for energetic resources is lower among the cold-blooded egg predators they typically encounter. Even though the total time in the stream bed is longer, the total energetic demand from predators in the stream during incubation is probably similar or even less. The greater threat is probably from large winter storms that move bedload and bury the redds.

Any quality/quanity comparison weights on the side of the trout going for a quality effort. Trout/salmonid eggs are huge compared to bass/sunfish, with a much more substantial yolk. They also tend to lay fewer eggs and the aelvins they produce are much bigger than larval sunfish. Larger fish (especially at that stage) have better burst speeds, more internal resources, fewer potential predators and therefore a better chance of survival.

Posted

Trout are born with yolk sacs like all salmonides and are pretty well crippled till it is absorbed. The others are born fully developed and lack the yolk sac, they are mobile quicker. You would think with the longer incubation time, they would function the opposite way.

Actually, centrarchids hatch with a small yolk sac too. It's not nearly as large as the salmonid sac and it doesn't last long but it's there.

Posted

Chief, are you talking about the period the eggs are "running" out of the female adult fish or the time it takes for the eggs to eye-up or go to larval stage? Since the title is "incubation" I'm guessing you mean egg development.

Yeah, from the time she drops them to the time they hatch. Rainbow's average around 4000 eggs. And just taking averages from river species, trout just seem to take much longer to hatch. And given that they don't drop anywhere near other river species, such as the smallmouth for instance, which will adverage around 8,000 for a 13-15 inch fish to a over 16,000 for a 15 to 17 inch specimen and with a comparable largemouth producing up to near 65,000 I wonder why.

And understandably colder water temps will affect this time. And that is why I find it somewhat "un-nature" like if you will. Not only do they have a longer incubation time, they also drop fewer eggs. Two definite strikes against the survival of your species. And being that trout have adapted to the colder water living many moons ago, it would only make sense that the eggs would have adapted a shorter incubation period to remove the increased chance of predation and winter floods.

Chief Grey Bear

Living is dangerous to your health

Owner Ozark Fishing Expeditions

Co-Owner, Chief Executive Product Development Team Jerm Werm

Executive Pro Staff Team Agnew

Executive Pro Staff Paul Dallas Productions

Executive Pro Staff Team Heddon, River Division

Chief Primary Consultant Missouri Smallmouth Alliance

Executive Vice President Ronnie Moore Outdoors

Posted

Pure speculation, but maybe it has to do with a nest versus scattering of the eggs. Perhaps overall the trout eggs aren't as vulnerable to predation.

Today's release is tomorrows gift to another fisherman.

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