Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations crappie in north idaho

budman - I have doubts as to the long term success of this idea. If you could keep the crappie from spawning or drastically reduce spawn success you would have much better chance of growing lots of large crappie WHEN stocked by themselves. There has been some discussion on this board and the NCRAC website (http://aquanic.org) about development or creation of triploid crappies (sterile). But they are not available yet. Blk crappie tend to grow better in clearer water & white crappie often "do better" in cloudier water. Several points or hurdles to overcome for this single species stocking to succeed.

Preface. Keep in mind your location and in northern ID you have a short growing season and crappie will grow slower for you than for our southern neighbors.

1. Crappies as large cleanable individuals are primarily minnow eaters and are generally pretty difficult to train to eat pellets. Cecil Baird did purchase some rare pellet trained crappies. But even with them, very few of their offspring will learn to eat pellets which means all the offspring that survive will have to eat large quanities of invertebrates and/or minnows for continued, fast, optimum growth.

2. Crappies can be very prolific under the right conditions. Real high numbers of them will very easily clean out your edible sized minnows. Blk crappie are thought to eat a little more percentage of insect/invertebrates than whites. When food becomes limiting, as with all fish, then no growth occurs for any size group of crappie. All stay the same size until food becomes abundant enough for growth to resume.

3. Lets explore this a little further. If you have an initial stocking of say 500 crappie per acre. NOTE: If we were stocking bgill we could stock more, maybe 700 to 1000/acre because they feed lower on the food chain ( eat mostly zooplankton & bugs not minnows). Ponds grow more pounds per acre of bugs (abt 10X) than minnows.
Also bgill will readily eat pellets and the bug food can be supplimented with pellets. This way we can easily insure ample food for bgill. This is the reason we stock fewer crappie per acre than bgill.

So for our 500 crappie to grow to one pound (a 11"-12" fish & abt 6 yr old) each needs to eat abt 10 lbs of minnows/fish/bugs which converts to 5000 lbs of total minnows to feed 500 crappie. This is probably a "doable" thing if you only have 500 crappie. BUT by the time the crappie are 6" (2-3 yr in your area)they are capable of spawning. A 1st spawn can easily overpopulate the pond where not enough food is now availabe for all to grow. Depending on survival of young, food becomes limiting very fast and overall growth grinds to a snail pace or stops. A 3 - 4 yr old female crappie has 33000 to 44000 eggs. Now instead of 500 crappie you can easily have 500 + 5000 young. Now to get all these growing to 1/2 lb each (9", 4 yr old) it's going to take around 27500 lbs of insects and minnows. The second spawn will add even more young hungry crappie to the pond.

Theory: My estimate of 5000 young surviving from the first hatch is a distinct possibility. If our 500 initial stock were 50% female(250), and let's say 200 spawn with 30000 eggs each, this = 6,000,000 eggs. Survival of 1/10th% to one year old gives 6000 young of the year fish or 30 young from each of the 200 nesting females. An estimate of 5000 for survival is a fairly low estimate of survival since crappie are nest spawners with parential care. Nest spawners typically have higher survivability of eggs compared to those of broadcast spawners with no parential care of fertilized eggs. Unprotected eggs are very vulnerable to various types of loss. Note: Survival of young of the 2nd generation would be quite a bit less than 5000 due to greater predation of hatchlings by first adults and 1st generation fish.

4. I fished a pond this summer that was stocked (1992) similar to what you want to do. The owner besides crappie also added yellow perch and catfish; no bass. Yearly adds minnows. He regularly feeds the fish but only the catfish and perch eat pellets. I fished (worm&bobber) primarily for perch since I was sampling perch for a article I am writing about growing perch in small ponds. In 90 min, he & I caught 18 perch and 18 crappie. Perch ranged from 6" to 11.2" long whereas crappie were all 6" - 6.25" long (1 was 8.2") with large eyes indicating that they were stunted. Crappie were overpopulated and overeating the food source but keeping the perch population thinned down to allow the surviving, pellet eating perch to grow. The few catfish present were also helping somewhat to thin the perch and crappie.

5. If you stock crappie with and without predators you need some means to keep the spawn to a minimum or be able to severly thin the numbers/offspring when necessary to insure good growth of remaining fish.