Sunfish management

[MoCarp]

Over the last decade the pressure on sunfish has exploded...newly American anglers have put extra pressure because of subsistence lifestyles... whole family’s with nothing more than a pop can and line...little regard for size or bag limits, just food for family..Kellogg Lake in Carthage used to have a nice population of slab redear and warmouth....now gone....there are a few places where big sunfish can be had...but better management is needed. Stocking of RedEar to help control zebra mussels and strains of bluegill like copper nose...warmouth often shunned by fisheries depts are great sport and commonly get over a  pound....so much more to say on this subject https://www.gameandfishmag.com/editorial/where-have-all-the-big-bluegills-gone/380547?fbclid=IwAR3to02-Bt1ujSMhk_zx5anvtqpvWQF0W7WDSZwCQENpRjcgn9S2OgJG-BE

 

 

[MoCarp]

[FishnDave]

This is a very real issue.  I was the elected President of a fishing club, and with our urging, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources was able to get bluegill and crappie bag limits placed in the Fishing Regulations.  I was also part of a very small team of anglers working with the Iowa DNR and a local city that had over 20 public ponds under their umbrella of management.  We looked at this issue very seriously.  We got signs with regulations posted at various ponds.  But the regulations were mostly targeting the bass populations.  The DNR didn't think we could be more restrictive on these pond bluegill populations than what the state regulations were.

Throughout my lifetime of over 50 years, 10" bluegills have been extremely rare.  Some may have not gotten measured, but ones I know for sure....probably number....4 or 5.  When waters I've fished over many years begin to show bluegills exceeding 9", folks start keeping them, and that water becomes ruined within one season.  Male bluegills on their nests are probably the easiest fish in the world to catch.  Several bluegill management articles I've read and seminars I've attended clearly state that the spawning male bluegills must be protected.

There's few methods of management that can help. 

As mentioned in the article linked above, put restrictive bag limits on harvest of bluegills.  But that doesn't really help smaller waters or high pressured waters.  Harvest will still be too high.  And the bigger fish are often removed first.

Or put a length limit on them...like: all bluegills over 8" must be released.  Most people don't want to clean bluegills under 7-8"...there just isn't much meat on fish that small.

A "restricted season" probably wouldn't work....since bluegills often spawn more than once during the year.  Spawning males would still get harvested.

One good management would be to only allow harvest of female bluegills.  That could work really well.  The problem is expecting casual anglers to be able to identify the gender of a bluegill....when most can't even tell the difference between different sunfish species.

One friend that is a retired small town doctor has earned access to many farm ponds near his community.  He is all about harvest.  He keeps ALL crappies he catches.  He keeps a few smaller bass.  He keeps bluegills, but releases those over 9".  He shares his catch with the landowners and others in the community.  They all love him.  His management technique seems to work very well.  But he is often the only person fishing these ponds, so that makes it easy to keep tabs on total harvest.  This might not work as well on waters that get harvested by more anglers.

It seems like fishing club anglers I knew, most had a disdain for pursuing bluegills, except during the ice-fishing season.  Then they were the #1 target species.  Go figure.

After some education on bluegill management, most of the club anglers would self-regulate their catch, releasing bluegills over 8", and just keeping the smaller fish.

[Quillback]

I believe a lot depends on how productive the lake is too.  The community lakes here in Bella Vista have very good bluegill populations with reasonable numbers of redears.  These fish get pounded, lots of gills get filleted, but these lakes consistently produce gills.  

[MoCarp]

From Minnesota:

”

Panfish

The panfish working group is considering proposals to reduce the current limit of 20 daily sunfish, according to Thompson, working group member. Roundtable participants were surveyed on possibilities that included:

• Keeping a 20-fish limit, with no more than five over 8 inches;

• A bag limit of 15, with no more than five over 8 inches;

• A bag limit of 10, with no more than five over 8 inches;

• Or a bag limit of 10, no size restrictions.

Anglers harvest an estimated 14 million panfish each year, but the size of sunfish is in decline.

The use of a continuous season on panfish with an aggregate limit has been in place since 1954. The bag limit was reduced from 30 to 20 in 2003. The limit was not based on biological principles, according to Thompson.

He said the committee wants to find a limit that will be socially acceptable to anglers. They need to be able to catch larger fish and have a high quality experience to support it, he explained.

He also acknowledged the difficulty of a one-size-fits-all approach. There are metro area lakes where a higher limit would make sense. The lakes will always put out large numbers of small fish. Let young people discover fishing on them with more liberal limits, he argued.

The DNR has used special restrictions aimed at protecting the size of sunfish on some lakes. The use of five- and 10-fish limits has had some success on these waters. Thompson said they tend to do well for a few years but over time, the numbers of larger sunfish tend to plateau.

A resort owner from Big Sand Lake said he believed the reduced bag limit would harm his business, but Thompson differed. Others said they felt that a lack of enforcement was also a problem, with locals as guilty as visitors when it comes to exceeding limits.”https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/sports/outdoors/4390990-new-fishing-regulations-spark-talk-about-new-walleye-panfish-and-catfish

 

 

 

 

 

[MoCarp]

One reason I advocate stocking of yellow perch and red ear, spread the harvest pressure...

it would also supply forage for bass and walleyes...IMHO way more fish get harvested than realized, bass included....I’d like to see a 8” min on panfish bag limit of 10, no bowfishing sunfish!...too easy to shoot a mess off the beds

I think we are getting to a point supplemental stocking of some species is warranted be it smallmouth/ walleye ( river strain) in streams

Back in the day the spring river drainage in SW Missouri supported jack salmon as the old timers called walleyes and spotted bass were not around just brown bass and largemouth in the sloughs...chain pickerel are not in many of the streams they once were....blue cats are not as common....habitat degradation and dams have a roll in that...some of those weedy sloughs had monster warmouth....not now.

Opportunities have been reduced, can’t just pull up to a creek and wade fish...fencing and new bridge design makes it almost impossible to get to the water much less put in a kayak or Jon boat, pushing more pressure to areas that can be accessed.

 

[Al Agnew]

Conventional wisdom is that you CAN'T harvest too many bluegill.  That if you don't take out enough of them, they will overpopulate and stunt, resulting in more but smaller fish.  Maybe that conventional wisdom is changing.  But I suspect this is something that is very different from one water body to another.  In my own experience, the forage base is the biggest influence on bluegill size.  I have (or had) a number of different ponds I fished for bluegill, including my own, my brother-in-law's, my father-in-law's, and a couple ponds owned by friends.  In my own pond, about 3/4ths of an acre, the male bluegill have always been 8-9 inches long.  I keep track of how many I take out of the pond each year...based upon a recommendation from an MDC biologist, I should take about 75 per year (100 per acre), but I usually take about 50-60, with probably 3/4ths of them males taken off beds.  My management strategy has obviously had very little effect on CHANGING the population structure, but seems to be pretty good at keeping it where it is.  My male bluegill are fairly thin for their length, but my pond does not have a really good forage base--the bass don't grow fast, either.

When I first started fishing my father-in-law's pond, which was less than a half acre in size, it was full of small bluegill, the males being about 6-7 inches long.  Nobody fished for them.  I started taking every bluegill I could out of the pond, did that for several years, taking at least 75 or so a year out.  Didn't make any difference whatsoever in the size structure.

My brother-in-law has two ponds.  One is about an acre, the other 1.5 acres.  Both have crappie, green sunfish, and redear as well as bluegill.  His family takes a lot of fish out of them.  The bluegill, and both bluegill/green and bluegill/redear hybrids, are all big, with 9 inchers common and some better than 10 inches.  But his ponds have a much better forage base, with a lot of crawdads and minnows.  He takes few bass out, but a lot of crappie, and the crappie are nice as well, though not huge.  Whatever he's doing, it seems to be working.

The thing is, I haven't seen any of these pond populations changing in the time I've watched them.  I'm not sure whether we really have a big impact on bluegill population size structure.    

[fishinwrench]

If you were to hit my favorite local bluegill hotspot anytime from April to the following February you'd think it was full of nothing but 5-6 inchers.

But if you hit it in late February-early March you'll quickly learn that there are plenty of big 'ol knot-headed gills in there.      Seems the big ones are the first ones to move up shallow and start feeding in the early-EARLY Spring.    Once the little farts move in the big ones seem to disappear....and it's likely that you won't catch another whopper the rest of the year.   Where they go, and what they do is a mystery to me.   But for 2-3 weeks during the late winter-early spring you can literally fill buckets with big fat ones nearly every day. 

[slothman]

Back when I was a kid and LOZ still had styrofoam docks, I used to catch monster bluegills around the docks. It wasn’t too long after all the encapsulated foam became standard that I really started to notice a reduction in the numbers and size. It has never been the same since. I know that correlation does not equal causation, but it does seem like there may have been some cause and effect there.  

[fishinwrench]

1 hour ago, slothman said:

Back when I was a kid and LOZ still had styrofoam docks, I used to catch monster bluegills around the docks. It wasn’t too long after all the encapsulated foam became standard that I really started to notice a reduction in the numbers and size. It has never been the same since. I know that correlation does not equal causation, but it does seem like there may have been some cause and effect there.  

I believe in the case of LO it is a forage base thing.  There's simply nothing for mature bluegill to eat.   The winter drawdowns effectively kill off mosquito larvae (we know that for a fact). Also most dragonfly and damselfly larva/nymphs are exposed-dried out-frozen as well.   The same reason that LO has no FROGS is the reason why it has very few mature bluegill.   There simply isn't enough food to sustain them through numerous growing seasons. 

If they were to halt the extreme winter drawdowns then a more healthy population of bluegill would eventually come back.  As would the aquatic insects, frogs, and the milfoil.

Crappie have a major advantage over bluegill on this lake simply because of the size of their mouths.   A mature bluegill just can't quite make a living on plankton, and he can't fit a 2-3" shad in his mouth.....so he only gets to chow down for a 2-3 week period, once per year, during post-spawn.   It's a long LONG wait between good solid meals. 

Back in the days of styrofoam dock floats they (General Electric) were not in the practice of drawing the lake down nearly as low.   We had milfoil back then too... because of that.    Milfoil and aquatic insects can't survive here anymore because of Ameren, who has effectively eliminated it/them via their more extreme winter drawdowns.

 

 

Listen to me, sounding all like a fisheries biologist and $#!t.   🙄