When I spent a concerted effort to learn about OSS, searching everything available on them, the one thing that stood out to me was that they have widespread distribution and yet are most often never noticed. This is norm with OSS. If you live in the plains states, the waters you fish very well may have them but you may have to work very hard to locate or catch any ... except in waters where they are more exceptionally abundant. My main reason for taking them off my priority list was because there are so many other options that I like better. Among them are some exceptional invertebrates and other small fish with high reproduction rates. I think the reason I like the satinfin group (Cyprinella sp.) so much is because it is a smaller gape fish that will fill a pond and utilize all of the water. The OSS didn't seem generalist enough to me and had potential to introduce food chain inefficiency through competition and predation. But in the end I concluded, which affirms Bill's point, that there are many unknowns, but most of all I thought they could introduce competition and predation factors that would reduce other prey fish that would probably be better choice.
I think one should never rely on any particular anecdote as an example of what one can expect. This includes the anecdote I referenced above and Snipe's anecdote of the 55 acre lake. The reason I asked Snipe about the standing crops was to check if any kind of pattern may exist in terms of the rare examples when they may achieve a proportion of the standing crop many deviations outside their mean (in the 16 ponds the mean was 4% of standing crop). Perhaps, that would provide some useful context we could evaluate. I also wondered whether LMB were very abundant in that lake. If anything like the anecdote that I referenced, the LMB would have an above average proportion of standing weight and they would not achieve a statewide 15" length limit. A minimum length harvest can't manage (let alone control) the numbers of LMB in any water where the fish cannot grow as large the minimum length limit. If the 55 acre lake is such an example, then the powers that be should allow the biologists set harvest limits that make sense for the lake instead of forcing them to resort to introducing other predators that would compete with an overabundant LMB population.
It's easy to get the cart before the horse or to call an effect the cause. To me its not very clear which is cause and which is effect. For example, are OSS the cause of LMB overabundance or does LMB overabundance create an environment where OSS can thrive and BG struggle to maintain a population? To be sure, each are reasonable hypotheses in the light of anecdotes where such conditions exist. Even so, my hunch is that community keystone (the LMB) plays the more important role and that managing their numbers would change the structure of OSS and BG.
Last edited by jpsdad; 07/01/22 07:22 AM.
