05-25-2016, 09:03 PM
[quote TubeDude]
1. There are no chubs, shiners, or other minnows in Jordanelle...and virtually zero crawdads.
2. Since the chubs disappeared, perch have been the ONLY source of forage for smallmouth and larger trout.
3. The perch population crashed several years ago and there are VERY FEW perch in the system. And the young are consumed by the smallmouth as fast as they can reproduce. THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH PERCH IN THE SYSTEM TO FEED THE PREDATORS...AND THE PREDATORS HAVE NOTHING ELSE TO EAT.
4. You advocate restricting the spawning habitat and recruitment of perch. That would be like filtering out all the zooplankton from a kokanee lake. Or having a mass dieoff of shad in Powell. Or any other ecological system you may understand better than Jordanelle.
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Oh, come one, Pat....surely you understand more than this...
1) Chubs, shiners, and other minnows all exist in the system (the provo river and inlets to the reservoir). If you eliminate or reduce the number of their top predators, those fish will show up in numbers again. Example after example of this same phenomena has occurred in Utah reservoirs time and again. Restricting the spawning of both perch and smallmouth would allow the chubs and other minnows a chance to return because those fish do exist upstream. A great example of this is Newcastle reservoir where right now golden shiners are virtually nonexistent; however, if wipers were totally removed or reduced (which is happening now) shiners will start showing up again from upstream sources. It is also what happens with threadfin at Powell.
2) To say that the only food for smallmouth and large trout are perch is naive at best. Trout very rarely, if ever, focus on one food source (lake trout may be the only real exception). Even those large brown trout will be utilizing available plankton and aquatic insects as forage at times. The same thing can be said about smallmouth....to say that they only eat perch fry is naive at best. You can't tell me that they don't feed on terrestrial insects and bugs as well as other aquatic insects. Also, if you allow other forage species a chance to thrive by controlling predator populations, you create a much more healthy system.
3) Like PBH has said over and over, adding more predators will not make more food available. You can't keep adding more and more fish to a full bucket and expect the size of all those fish to be bigger and bigger. To get the size of the fish in the bucket bigger, you have to remove some of the fish and allow the remainder room to grow. If you eliminate fish from that bucket, all the fish remaining will have more food. It doesn't really matter how many perch are or are not in the reservoir. The problem is that there are too many predators in the reservoir.
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1. There are no chubs, shiners, or other minnows in Jordanelle...and virtually zero crawdads.
2. Since the chubs disappeared, perch have been the ONLY source of forage for smallmouth and larger trout.
3. The perch population crashed several years ago and there are VERY FEW perch in the system. And the young are consumed by the smallmouth as fast as they can reproduce. THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH PERCH IN THE SYSTEM TO FEED THE PREDATORS...AND THE PREDATORS HAVE NOTHING ELSE TO EAT.
4. You advocate restricting the spawning habitat and recruitment of perch. That would be like filtering out all the zooplankton from a kokanee lake. Or having a mass dieoff of shad in Powell. Or any other ecological system you may understand better than Jordanelle.
[/b][/#0000FF][/quote]
Oh, come one, Pat....surely you understand more than this...
1) Chubs, shiners, and other minnows all exist in the system (the provo river and inlets to the reservoir). If you eliminate or reduce the number of their top predators, those fish will show up in numbers again. Example after example of this same phenomena has occurred in Utah reservoirs time and again. Restricting the spawning of both perch and smallmouth would allow the chubs and other minnows a chance to return because those fish do exist upstream. A great example of this is Newcastle reservoir where right now golden shiners are virtually nonexistent; however, if wipers were totally removed or reduced (which is happening now) shiners will start showing up again from upstream sources. It is also what happens with threadfin at Powell.
2) To say that the only food for smallmouth and large trout are perch is naive at best. Trout very rarely, if ever, focus on one food source (lake trout may be the only real exception). Even those large brown trout will be utilizing available plankton and aquatic insects as forage at times. The same thing can be said about smallmouth....to say that they only eat perch fry is naive at best. You can't tell me that they don't feed on terrestrial insects and bugs as well as other aquatic insects. Also, if you allow other forage species a chance to thrive by controlling predator populations, you create a much more healthy system.
3) Like PBH has said over and over, adding more predators will not make more food available. You can't keep adding more and more fish to a full bucket and expect the size of all those fish to be bigger and bigger. To get the size of the fish in the bucket bigger, you have to remove some of the fish and allow the remainder room to grow. If you eliminate fish from that bucket, all the fish remaining will have more food. It doesn't really matter how many perch are or are not in the reservoir. The problem is that there are too many predators in the reservoir.
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