Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Yellow Perch and Frogs

Has anyone else ever gutted a yellow perch caught beneath the ice to find freshly eaten frogs in the stomach?

I noticed this a few years and it blew me away. The frogs were almost intact and barely digested which led me to believe they were recently eaten. Further, there was 24" of ice and the lake had been locked-up for at least 3 months. I suppose the perch were rooting around the bottom and picking-off the hibernating frogs?? This was observed in several yellow perch that we cleaned. I witnessed this while fishing in SD a few years back.

This topic came up last night in a phone conversation, and I am curious to learn if anyone else has witnessed this. This could very well be a well-known fact, but to me it was a tremendous discovery.

By the way, four of us caught 7 perch that day over 14", two of which are hanging on my wall.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Shawn,

I've seen the same in trout. However I have to wonder if digestion is so slow under the ice that it just looks like they were recently eating, and in fact were ingested in the fall?

On the other hand I had some tapoles on top of the ice this winter in my bluegill production pond that were wallowing around in some surface water. I had a partial thaw and they came up for some reason and got trapped on top of the ice. I'm sure the Crows like that.

Cecil,

I wondered the exact same thing about the potential for slow digestion. I just plain don't know the answer. All I know is that the frogs would have had to have been in their stomachs for at least 3 months if fall ingestion were the case.

That's interesting about your trout. Same situation?? Fish from under the ice??

My completely non-scientific guess is that they are close to freshly eaten frogs. If they were eaten in the fall, surely they would have gone through some digestive decomposition by the time heavy ice-over happened.

I'm with Sunil. Either they were still alive so as not to decompose or they were very recently eaten.

Shawn, we frequently observe this with walleyes. Can't say that I have seen it or heard of it with perch. The frogs need oxygen over the winter, so we usually have a frog migration right before ice-up. They actually seem to leave some of the smaller marshes and head to the big lakes. The walleyes pound on them, usually beginning in October before ice begins. Interesting that perch had them, although you'd think that if the size was right, the perch would sure take them.

Who'd have thunk it, a prime ice fishing bait... Frogs!

They weren't my trout they were browns in a local natural lake. I caught them in open water in the spring when the lake still had ice on it and the frogs were in their stomachs.

I don't doubt that larger perch eat small frogs during ice cover. Perch are noted for rooting out mayfly larva from the sediments in winter. YP probably eat most anything that wiggles during the sediment rooting. We have even caught perch with a fair amouint of zebra mussels and snails the their gut.

Since YP are quite active during winter I suspect the frogs in the stomach were freshly eaten at least within the last couple days. As active a YP are in winter it does not take long for digestion to occur in YP stomachs. Since frogs have "thin skin" compared to a scaley fish the skin will start digesting pretty fast in a perch's stomach. Shawn what type of frog were they - leopard, cricket or real young bull or green frogs?

I just called one of the guys that I was fishing with that day. He was one of Dr. Willis' PhD students. The lake was Reetz lake and Dan told me that he started paying attention to this after we noticed the frogs. He fished the lake many times after, and he frequently observed that perch over 12" had leopard frogs in their stomachs.

Interestingly, this was the only lake that he recalls seeing this. The perch in this lake were specifically managed for trophy fishing, so maybe its related to the size of the fish. Perhaps he didn't see this in other lakes because the perch were smaller and didn't seek the frogs? Or maybe its related to the frog density in this lake? I may never know.

YP eat heartily on zebra mussels, in the great Lake Erie anyway. We catch a couple hundred each year in 45-65 feet of water and they vomit zebra mussels and their air bladder when you bring them up, proof enough for me. I have even found you increase your strike rate by allowing your bait to lay on the bottom a few seconds at a time allowing the Perch to pick it up off the bottom. We put our fish on ice immediately in a cooler and after cleaning the fish the cooler always has a nice slurry of water, ice, blood, slime, minnow parts, air bladders, and zebra mussels. I dump it in the garden.

I have made a few dozen trips to SD for the yellow perch fishing, but have never cleaned any with frogs in their stomach. Being in the biology field, if I see a fish with an unusually full stomach I have to cut it open. And usually I cut a few stomachs open anyway to see what the fish are eating.

But in those trips we almost never caught any perch over 12-12.5". Actually the only time we have ever caught any perch bigger is the one trip we took to Reetz Lake, the same one Shawn caught his wall hangers at. My best was 13.75" (I wish now that I had mounted it, but want to hold out for a true 2 pounder, which is generally 14"+). We didn't check the stomachs on those fish because we didn't clean them.