Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Yellow perch spawning

3/19/24 yellow perch are spawning in southwest michigan. Running about 2 weeks early in my ponds. Anyone else seeing this?

H20fwler - Air temperature and Water cooling after the eggs are laid has little detriment to the developing eggs other than slowing the hatching time. Dr. Dave Willis at SDSU and a graduate student studied the colder water affects on YP egg development and wrote about it in PBoss magazine. Actually the the colder water temperatures did not cause a significant decrease of egg hatching. My pond water temperature yesterday Apr 08 was still around 53F in NW Ohio and similar to and just slightly higher compared to the water temps of most of the egg laying. The main things that will affect egg hatch are increased siltation from watershed runoff that suffocates eggs and the location where the eggs were deposited. Best egg hatch will be if the ribbons were stretched out among old weed stems or hanging on brush or structure where moving water can circulate around the ribbon keeping eggs well oxygenated. Eggs laid in a gathered clump on the bottom has poor egg hatch except for the eggs on the outside edges of the cluster.

none visible for me yet. Hope to see some soon! Congrats SetterGuy, hope you see more this year!

Yes.. I have 4-5" females blowing little ribbons in tanks every year.

Yes, males are flowing at 3-4". You can't "see" they are fertilized unless you pull it up and look very close, if it has a white dot in nucleus, it has not been fertilized fully. Most ribbons have mixed fertilization that's why it's important to have plenty of males.

They are bottom dwellers in most cases, not often seen other than on a hook with a worm, unless feed trained, then they will frequently be seen sucking pellets from the surface.
One item of interest is spawning habitat, dense fresh tree limbs (Cedars work ok) in 2-3' water, or in my case, a few days after adding weighted tumbleweeds, they look like they are covered in toilet paper in the next week. Keeping the ribbons off of the bottom is key, they seem to be better at successful hatches up off bottom with good flow around them. I do see them blow ribbons on my Gee minnow traps as well, they like a sturdy structure up off of bottom.

That means it is time to take the kids/grandkids fishing and see if you can catch one of those fat females and break the existing pond record for yellow perch!

We had unusually cold days and nights. We have had heavy cold rain and some cold spells. Not much sunlight. But still no perch ribbons. Must be no perch left in the pond. I'm thinking this year is a good time to focus on adding structure and building forage options again. Would love to find time to find/net some local mudminnows or BNM for another starter forage species.

My daughter is still catching some jumbo leftover golden shiners from the original stocking around 10 yrs ago with hook and corn bait.

Still struggling to get the remaining unwanted jumbo goldfish out as they have become quite hookshy. I was hoping not to have to use the selective -carpicidal chemical treatment, but if they can't be netted or caught on hook then they will continue to grow and reproduce. They are big enough that it would have to take a very large LMB to target them.

Knobber, the YP are pretty good at staying out of your view. I only saw mine because they were pellet trained. And even then you rarely got to recognize them, but only you recognized their swimming pattern or their surface attack pattern. They would rocket up from the bottom and make a quick flip-turn at the top and rocket down so without a high speed camera you couldn't be sure it was a YP.

I did see as the YP got larger and more accustomed to coming to getting the pellets in the same place they would kind of coast up to the surface and take it down and do their little flip turn and head back down where you could actually make them out. I also found that they liked to hang out under my large turtle float. I think it gave them shade all day and a natural cover in about 6' of water. If I threw the pellets on top or and on the sides of the turtle float they would come up under it and feel more comfortable showing themselves. So consider putting a floating raft/dock or even a floating square out there and feed around it and the YP may predictably come up.

I made my turtle floats out of a scrap piece of garage door that was laying around. The door is clad in aluminum which doesn't rot/rust and it has thin layer of foam insulation in between to help it float. I had some old rescued commercial carpet squares that I screwed on top to give the turtles something to grip their claws into when climbing up. I also left the carpet square on the edges sticking over about 6" which lets them droop in the water and the turtles will often just float on the edge of the carpet square in the water before climbing on board.

The first early Yellow perch egg ribbons are showing up now in central Ohio March 11 to 15 after a couple warm days. There was a report that Ron Crismon also saw a couple early ribbons. I had a ribbon Mar 16 and water in the shallows was 44F this morning with a few snow flurries.