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.
