Decided it was finally time to start identifying the minnow species in our creek. It has been pretty dry lately, so the the creek is running about an 1" deep except for the pools (2-3' deep).
Threw the minnow trap into one of the pools and then watched all of the fish behaviors, instead of going back to work.
I did have a good school of minnows in the pool, but they were not interested in my bait (dry cat food). However, the school of 3" long minnows was constantly stalked by 4" long LMB. I never saw the bass hit the minnows, but I could almost see the little cartoon thought bubbles over the heads of the bass, "You just wait, one of these days I am going to be big enough to eat you!"
There were no large bass in that pool. Instead, the top predators were GSF. They were all sizes, but the largest were maybe 1/2#. They immediately hit any grasshoppers, leaf bits, etc. that get knocked into the water as I walk up to the pools.
I thought the behavior of these GSF was very interesting. This creek pool essentially has zero structure. When things calmed down after setting the minnow trap, the GSF seemed to take up station around the trap, a foot or two away.
I am used to seeing LMB hide in sparse cover, ready to spring out from ambush on any prey that happens by. It looked to me like the GSF had the opposite strategy, they took position OUTSIDE of the cover, waiting to ambush any prey that emerged FROM the cover.
(There were no minnows around the trap when the GSF had set up on their stations.)
P.S. I came back to the pool after a few hours of work and caught zero minnows. I think I chose poorly with my bait. My previous effort with bread caught only small GSF.
