Jason, I once tried to replicate that. I bought a duck, killed it, and tried, with both feet and feathers to get BG eggs to stick to them. They didn't. Of course, this was neither scientific nor peer reviewed. Just one curious Texas redneck who couldn't make it happen.
Nevertheless, a good observation.
It seems to me that eggs have a very short period of time at which they are sticky anyway. I am quite skeptical of the sticking eggs theory, regardless of the species of fish and the extent of the stickiness of their eggs. We shouldn't overlook the role substrate could play, particularly for wading birds whose feet may sink partially into soft muddy bottoms potentially mixing eggs with a substrate that retains sticky properties indefinitely and that might serve to slow desiccation.
The one piece of research that really piqued my attention was that ducks can eat pike eggs and pass them in a viable state after which they have been observed to hatch. Such a mechanism also requires that they spawn when ducks are present and that the do so at depths available to ducks consistent with their feeding behaviors.
I would certainly like to know more as to how the pike eggs may be adapted to withstand the digestive track of ducks. It is certainly well known that plants induce vectors to spread their seed by encasing them in fruit. For fish, this type of vector mechanism would seem parasitic in that the ducks may receive no benefit. Nevertheless, an egg adapted to survive the digestive system of waterfowl might prove a very useful adaptation for a fish.
It is less a question about how remote lakes were stocked (Man has been doing it for a very long time anyway) and more a question of the risks birds may pose for distributing invasive species.
