Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Crappie

I believe the latest "in-fisherman" had an article on a tracking study done on white and black crappies in the same resevior. I only got to skim the article but the jist of it was that black crappies prefer shalow inshore habitats and that white crappies prefer deep water and structure in the open lake. In that case black crappies are the more reasonable choice for a small pond.

Dr.D W and Bill Cody; Not sure I have a good handle on crappie thriving to 12 inch on zooplankton and bugs. It almost seems that they would have to be continously filter feedering to get enough groceries out of the little bitty stuff to thrive and gain weight. Do I misunderstand the size of the zooplankton? What am I missing?

Thanks
Dave

Tim, from what I read Big Channels can be quite aggressive on Small Panfish such as crappie and even bream. Just read the thread called "Too Many Big Channel cats" I think it's called.

Keep your channels if you like them or bass will work as well. Although I did here you say the Channels were eating the bass..

Any way I believe the most important thing you can do for a crappie fishery is yes FISH THEM HARD!!!
Then make sure you have astablished a Very GOOD Forage progam...mostly with a fertalization and a good threadfin population.

Remember what the underline thing that most of these experts are saying, "these fish will eat you out of the house if you are not carfull."

Hi Dave. Reasonable questions, but I'm not sure I can provide better answers. You are asking for reasonable explanations of what seems to be an unreasonable observation. :-) The problem is that I did those food habits samples every month -- we tubed their stomachs and released them. I've got to admit that I was surpised as well. I may not have been as surprised if it had been big aquatic insects. However, the story is even further from that. Most of those big crappies had a ball of zooplankton in their stomachs in most months. They were plump, and growing fast. It may not seem right, but it was. That's why I started my response right upfront saying that crappies eat fish prey, when available. After we did that study, we were reading papers and talking to various people, trying to figure out how it could even be possible. The zooplankton were big, I'm guessing most between 0.5 mm and 1.5 mm, which is typical in a predator-dominated fish community. However, these were 12 inch black crappies, with all that zooplankton in the stomachs. One crappie "expert" we found suggested that black crappies could somehow collapse their gill rakers to strain the zooplankton, but we never found any evidence to support that theory.

So, there you are. I can only report what we observed, and can't give a satisifying explanation. Sometimes with Mother Nature, things just are?? I don't know. :-)

Dave

For Dave Willis:

Do you think that the crappie's apparent ability to feed on zooplankton could explain why they seem to proliferate in the extreem? (It might be part of the cause of thier apparent "curse" status in regard to the small pond environment...

I think the results of your crappie feeding/stomach survey make sense when you consider that crappies in large impoundments tend to school and suspend in open water for large periods of time during the year. I wouldn't expect minnows and other forage fish species to do the same because they would probably be decimated by the crappies, as well as walleyes, Pike, and a whole host of other "open water" preadators. The crappies don't seem to be as aggressive when the suspend deep (although they will take a minnow if you can get one down to them).

This has beeb a very interesting thread. Thanks for letting us in on your information.

Of the twenty ponds that I've managed over the last few years the clearer ponds always have predominant black crappie populations. Clearer ponds produce more phytoplankton, which fuels a healthy zooplankton community. Those ponds with high predator densities have the fastest growing black crappies with the best body condition. I've checked the stomach contents of every single harvested fish, which number nearly one thousand individuals and have found fewer than ten of these black crappies with any identifiable fish remains. Generally the blacks have a large quantitity of zooplankton in their stomachs. In one particular 3.5 acre pond the black crappie often have massive quantities of a prey item that we've keyed to phantom midges. Hardly a very big item, but found in large quantities and without very good escape mechanisms. It's not so much size that matters, it's the average amount of energy expended by the black crappie as it relates to calories found in the prey item. If the crappie expends .005 calories to catch a phantom midge, with an average calorie value of .008 the black crappie will continue to feed and feed and feed, and will subsequently thrive. If each fathead minnow has .9 calories but the black crappie misses half of the time and expends .45 calories with each effort it can't keep up with maintenance needs and will become stunted. Look at it this way...You'll get fat if you never have to leave the couch and your wife brings you McDonald's french fries and peanuts. You won't get fat if you have to run three miles to McDonalds for a double Big Mac with cheese and they're closed three times out of four.

There has been so much good information given so far. Black crappie seem to be able to grow on small food items where white crappie cannot. That an animal can grow big on small items is not as strange as it seems. Baleen whales in saltwater and paddlefish and sturgeon in freshwater grow very big on very small prey. While not growing big, gizzard shad can grow a tremendous amount of biomass on very small food. Bruce Condello explained how this happens.

I think the answer to this whole puzzle goes back to what happens in large lakes that does not happen in small lakes. I think the answer has already been given. Crappies are schooling fish. In large lakes they are only reproducing in part of the lake. That means that LMB are successfully reproducing in other parts of the lake. In small lakes, this separation is not occurring. That means the young crappie in a small lake are close enough to the young LMB to eat most or all of them. Remember that Bob Lusk said that crappie reproduce before LMB. Over time, that means a loss of predators to keep crappie populations in check.

In northern lakes, yellow perch and northern pike reproduce before crappie. This might be one reason crappie aren’t as big of a problem in northern lakes as southern lakes without these species.

Before moving forward on how to manage crappie, I’d like some comments about whether my analysis of the situation is accurate so far.

Norm, I think that you're on target. I believe your observation in pointing out spawn timing is a crucial key. All fry and fingerlings consume small prey so it would be intuitively correct that there is a significant advantage to getting a head start.

Bruce,

Bob made an observation concerning a stunted crappie situation that benefited from introduction of hybrid striped bass. Can you comment on your experience with this predator/prey relationship in your NE ponds.

Gumboot/Pedro,

I know you're just trying to rack up a few posts for lunker status.

Actually my personal pond has had striped bass hybrids and black crappie. I purposely created a pond with only minimal littoral or shore habitat. Steep slopes, no submerged cedars...anything I could do to tip the scales toward my SBH. It worked almost too well. In three years I never saw any black crappie reproduction. However the adult fish that I started with grew quite well. Some went to 14 inches. (Whew, I accidentally wrote 24 inches at first. I think I might have lost a little credibility with that one.)

In a paper written for the "North American Journal of Fisheries Management" 19:1044-1053, 1999 Neal, Noble and Rice wrote that hybrid striped bass introduction in small warmwater impoundments resulted in significant increases in total lengths and Wr's of bluegill, redear sunfish and black crappie. Not surprisingly the Wr's of LMB decreased because the SBH (which were quite small, by the way) consumed the Centrarchids (sunfish) at rate of nearly one million per hectare.

English translation. If you want to control crappie, bluegill and redear sunfish populations with striped bass hybrids, to a point that there is no stunting and maximum growth you need the following equation.

1. Stock plenty of smaller SBH
2. Give them an environment that they can catch their prey.
3. Be willing to give up largemouth bass body condition in trade.

The largest fish in the world eats almost exclusively plankton. And don't forget the silver and bighead carp, both exclusive planktivores.

Notice the body shape and the size of the eye. Compressiform fish are not highly adapted predators, they are not very fast. Crappie are adapted for manuverability, tight turns and fast stops. The large eyes of crappies allows them to see small prey easily. In effect, they are adapted for precision feeding.

Crappies might exclude bass and other predators by consuming all of the zooplankton, not by eating age 0 bass. Because they hatch early and eat lots of zooplankton (especialy when small) they may actualy eat so much zooplankton that there isn't enough food for LMB or BG fry to find food. It is critical that fry are able to find a good zooplankton meal soon after they hatch.
BG have been documented to prevent successful walleye hatch at densities of 50kg/ha or about 43lb/acre. Most likely they do this by eating all the zooplankton.

TyW33,

Not only do newly hatched larval fish need early zooplankton nutrition, but their overall foraging success in their first growing season has a large bearing on first winter survival. I don't know if that's correct in Texas but around here YOY walleye that make it to first ice as healthy 7-9 inchers have excellent winter survival. Those that don't have adequate availability of small prey items for early development hit that first winter at 4-6 inches, in poor body condition and practically disappear by the following spring. I'm sure this has some validity for all pond fish.

There has been lots of good autecology of crappie in this productive thread. A couple of my references indicate that crappie have 25-29 rakers on the first gill arch compared to 8-12 on rock bass, bluegills, and LMB. Big difference in raker numbers here and evidence why crappie can be good filterers of larger zooplankton such as Daphnia, Diaptomids and Chaoborus (phantom midge larvae). Lots of protein in those "bugs" for the effort expended as Bruce pointed out. Many of these larger zooplankton inhabit the deeper waters during day and migrate to near surface at night.

Ty made a good point about certain body features of crappie make them suited as good planktivours and what he says makes sense. I think black crappie populations usually do better in clearer water because larger forms of zooplankton are common inhabitants of clearer water. Crappie cn feed on these zooplankton when other foods are in short supply. Water in many ponds lakes is generally clearer due of greater densities of the larger filtering zooplankers such as Daphnia and Diaptomids (Chaoborus is predatory). It is starting to make sense why the best black crappie fisheries occur in waters that contain abundances of the larger zooplankters as noted by Bruce and Dave.

The body/eye size thing makes sense but why don't white crappie eat zooplnkton? They are shaped the same so they don't have the speed of HSB nor the mouth size of LMB. I've always wondered how white crappie can be effective predetors with small mouths and grouped together around brush.

This is one of my favorite subjects! It's been a while since I've been able to visit the site. I am very interested in Bruce's results with the hybrids.

I have experimented with them (hybrid stripers) to control crappie numbers and hopefully to increase crappie growth but did not see the results I was hoping to see. However, my situation is different because gizzard shad were present. The hybrids primarily ate the gizzard shad and to a limited extent, the sunfish. THis is also a much bigger lake. We did see minimal growth increases in the crappie but nothing significant. We think that the competition between gizzard shad and crappie for the zooplankton was reduced due to the hybrids preying upon the gizzard shad; thus, decreasing the gizzard shad numbers slightly enough to allow the crappie more access to the zooplankton. Nothing is concrete and I'm not allowed to "play" anymore.

But, I opened my own pond consulting business so I can "play" and continue to learn. I still do the Missouri Conservation gig to pay the bills. Bruce, do you have gizzard shad in your ponds with crappie and hybrid striped bass? I hope you don't. I am very interested in approaching some private pond owners about stocking hybrids in their ponds. I would like to know the impact that the hybrids have on the sunfishes...particularly the crappie and bluegill. Most ponds around me have bass, bluegill, catfish, and occassionally crappie. If it's alright, I would like to give you a call. I have lots of questions for you. I will share you're answers on this site, but I would hate to bog the website down with the amount of questions I have.

Also, someone mentioned channel catfish impacts. FYI- my buddy Isermann and I shocked Normandy reservoir in Tennessee 12 hours after fingerling crappie were stocked. We were interested in seeing if anything was eating them. Boy were they an easy target! We split open a 7-8 lb channel catfish that had 118 crappie in its gut. We also gutted some bluegill that ate the crappie. This wasn't a formal study so the results will probably not ever be in the literature. We were just doing some exploring. Moral of the story.....be careful when you stock. It was pretty crazy to see how many crappie got whacked that night. Just about every species of fish we shocked had taken advantage of the free meal. Gotta go. Shawn

I figure I am going to have some problems in my 5 acre pond before too long. My well-wishing neighbor put about 80 adult black crappie in my half acre pond. Some have been fished out, but a few made their way to my larger pond. Last year I caught a couple of 4-6 inch crappie, a 12 inch crappie (big sucker!) and even saw a few tiny fish that I think were crappie. I also have some good sized bass, lots of mid sized bass, and tons of sunfish, even though this pond was completely dry three short years ago. The pond was never formally stocked, just the great prarire fish migration. And big_pond, there are a couple of flatheads and a couple of blues that have been introduced as well. (I made my first pathetic attempt at journalism in this months Pond Boss, writing about this pond's history.) Short term everything is growing like crazy, but in a few years I am going to have serious issues, I'm sure. Shawn, I might be a candidate for some HSB. For now, I'm just going to monitor and see how things come out.

Shawn (Banks, that is): Thanks for posting that observation on the channel catfish eating those stocked crappies. To be honest, if you had asked me to predict, I would have said that would NOT have happened. So, once again, I'll have to modify my thinking. Man, I wish I could improve above 50-50 on my pet theories! :-)

Dave

You know, this has been the most fascinating thread that PB has had in a while. Finding that crappie are zooplankton eaters and prosper on it plus finding that channel cats clobber crappie. This could open up some new thought processes on stocking. I hope Shawn Banks does post the findings. This is good. Thanks to all who are contributing. You guys (too many to mention) are why this is the best pond site on the net.

Hey Doc Willis, your post reminds me of the old joke about the College Dean who was addressing the new Graduates about the future. He said that he had 2 confessions to make. First is that 50% of everything they had been taught was wrong. The second confession was that he had no idea which 50% that was.

For such a crappie name crappies sure get a lot of attention on here!

Here's another thing to add to the stew. I happen to know rainbow trout can and do feed primarily on zooplanton in lakes were other forage is lacking. According to literature I have see rainbow are supposed to be abl to get to 5 lbs or so in three years on a strictly zooplankton diet. Even lake trout can exist on zoo plankton but in that species their size suffers.

Of course that is lakes vs. ponds but I though it might be of interest that trout can also effeciently feed on zooplakton.

Here is my "spin" on this at this point.

I think if one reads the past posts in this thread carefully you will find that black and white crappie can feed on zooplankton. It may not have been specifially stated that way since white crappie tend to have a larger portion of their diet as minnows as compared to black crappie.

If you dig into the good fishery literature you will find that white crappie will at times feed heavily on zooplankton. In a PA reservoir, Mathur and Robbins 1971 concluded that plankton feeding by adult white crappie was due to their long gill rakers. Becker says zooplankter type organisms are a significiant food throughout the life of white crappie. but insects and forage fish are usually the major food of large white crappie. The percentages of zooplankton, insects and fish seem to vary somewhat with each study. In an IA study plant materials & insect adults never accounted for more than 5% of the diet of white crappie.

I think white crappie tend to eat more fish and less invertebrates than the black crappie for probably two reasons. 1. White crappie may have a slightly greater "preference" for fish than black crappie. 2. and more importantly ecological conditions may play a big role in diet of the two crappie species. White crappie seem to be more tolerant of cloudier water or are found to be more successful or occur more frequently in "muddier" or cloudier water than black crappie who succeed best in clearer waters where larger zooplankton forms thrive. Normally zooplankton at least the larger forms of zooplankton do not thrive as well in muddier conditions compared to clearer waters. Phytoplankton (zooplankton food) also does not grow as well in muddier water compared to clearer water; it is a light thing. Cloudier water probably contains relatively more minnow forage items than larger zooplankton items and white crappie thrive there and thus eat what is most abundant, small fish. Clearer water typically has relatively more forms of larger zooplankton and fewer forage minnows thus black crappie thrive better in those conditons and a big part of their diet becomes zooplankton since it is relatively more abundant or "easier" to eat/catch. White crappie may have more minnows in their diet due to a particular lake has a stronger small fish community than the assemblage of larger forms of zooplankton, thus these whites eat more small fish since they are relatively more abundant.

Bottomline, I think both types of crappie can utilize large zooplankters and the extent that each eats those zooplankters depends on how abundant the larger zooplankters are in each individual lake/pond compared to the abundance and compositon of the small fish community.

Gentlemen,

If you can’t tell, I’m really enjoying this thread. I’m going to take my turn at wrapping up all of this crappie foraging theory into one ball.

With a little gentle borrowing from a couple of resources I’d be happy to name later, I present the “Condello Theory of White and Black Crappie Foraging Habits”.

Through the amazing observations and hard work of Charles Darwin, in the middle of the nineteenth century emerged the Darwin Theory of natural selection. Darwin proposed that all living things were descended from a common ancestor. Some of us believe in evolutionism, some in creationism, and many in a combined form that gives us peace. Regardless, Darwin invoked a mechanism that he called natural selection. According to Darwin, not all organisms were equally fit for survival and reproduction. Those best adapted to their current surroundings tended to leave more progeny, meaning that these adaptations, and the genes being expressed as these adaptations were spread about at higher frequencies throughout the population.

Darwin had one extremely glaring problem with his theory. He had made no explanation for heredity. This was Mendel’s realm. Although living at the same time, Darwin and Mendel never met and there was never any evidence that Darwin was aware of Mendel’s work. For the next hundred years, scores of famous geneticists labored to incorporate Mendel’s classic discoveries into Darwinian theory.

One of these famous geneticists was S. Wright. In Wright’s model, each population of a species was symbolized by a specific point on a map he called the adaptive landscape. As species changed through time, through evolution, they moved to higher elevations on the map. More fit species were moved to higher elevations and less fit species occupied the lower elevations.

At first this map was based on the idea that many changes in a population were random, which truly aren’t likely events. As I’ve mentioned before, a random mutation is not very likely to be of benefit to a species. It’s akin to improving Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s racecar by shooting a .22/250 through the engine. The great majority of the time greater harm occurs than good. Anyway, to beat this problem, Wright proposed that evolution occurs in small, mostly isolated breeding units called “demes”.

The classic Genetics 101 example of this occurs in the peppered moth, Biston betularis. I’ll bet a lot of you remember this from high school. Anyway, the peppered moth was found in wooded areas through England where it existed in two forms called appropriately, light and dark. Imagine the creativity that went into this naming.
Since the mid 1800’s the frequency of the dark form has increased from only a couple of percent to over ninety percent in the highly industrialized areas, while remaining quite rare in rural areas. Apparently the trees in the industrialized areas were taking on a dark color because of the soot emitted from factories. The dark moth stood a significant advantage against predation from birds when at rest on the dark trees and so became the dominant form.

Black and white crappie are likely branches of the same trunk of evolution. This explains their similar look and their ability to hybridize with one another. In all likelihood there was a time that as the original crappie, or common ancestor if you will, was broken into many isolated breeding units. This still occurs today. Anyway, into order to move to higher elevations on S. Wright’s adaptive landscape they continued to vary in ways, some subtle, some not that allowed them to move to higher elevations. Some examples might be new unique coloring patterns, slightly different body shape, different number of dorsal spines, and most importantly feeding habits. Some of the isolated populations found themselves in areas that had few or no small fish available. Maybe other isolated populations had abundant fish and began to specialize in eating these fish in order to move to a higher elevation.

As centuries and millennia passed, these two species began to differ more and more in order to take advantage of their particular niches. Human skin pigmentation changed over just a few hundred thousand years to take advantage of different climatological influences, and crappie characteristics did likewise. Black and white crappie changed to be better.

Then came the Pondmeister. The Pondmeister takes crappie from one type of environment and places them in a different type. And then another type, and another. Some of the white crappie find themselves in systems like the ones that their isolated breeding group ancestors were in. Lots of fish to eat. They thrive. Yes, they have enough survival instinct to eat zooplankton, but it may not really be what they’re hardwired to eat. The black crappie tends to do pretty darn well with fish OR zooplankton. Could it be that the white crappie is the offshoot? Split off from the main group for tens of thousands of years, never needing to be very good at utilizing plankton? Or maybe the black crappie is the outshoot. If the original crappie was purely a fish eater, then maybe the black crappie was isolated to a situation where it had to become good at eating plankton. Will we ever know? Will anyone ever care? Did anyone read past the second paragraph of this post? We’ll never know…………

Anyway, maybe it’s just enough to know that the black crappie does something better than the white crappie. The chimp probably makes a better ant collecting stick than an orangutan. Hee hee.

Shawn Banks call me sometime. Email me at bmcondello@bizfunctional.com and I'll shoot you my phone numbers.

Later,

Bruce

Lake victoria in africa had hundreds of species of cichlids, all diverged from a single ancestor less than 10,000 years ago. There were many species that all utilized the same food source but in diffrent parts of the lake. There were at least 5 species that ate exclusively zooplankton. One of the species was always found in the top 6 feet of water. Other species migrated through the day following the food. Other species lived deep or inshore or over rocky bottms, exclusively.
Because of abundant resources, constant food supplies, sexual selection, and variable habitat many species are able to co-exsist on the same food supply. Even though they eat the same food they don't eat the same prey at the same time in the same place. (If your a geek like me you would enjoy the book "Darwin's Dream Pond", its about the evolution of cichlids)
Black crappie and white crappie may eat exactly the same thing but they do so in diffrent places. Black crappie live inshore and white crappie live offshore. They may live on the same food sources, or on what ever happens swims infront of them. Over time they make small adaptions, spawn at slightly diffrent times and live in diffrent places. In a large lake they may not compete at all, in a pond there is little difference between inshore and offshore and they probably wouldn't coexsist well.
It is possible that niether one represents the "original" but that instead the ancestor is a planktivore generalist, that adapted to a slightly larger size and the ability to eat minnows. And then that split in half, one for inshore on for off.

Wow! You start talkin' genetics and this thread went "THUD"!

Is there a particular advantage to having one or two extra spines? I would assume it to be an environmental adaption.