Perch are a bit of an enigma. Hard to say why they prosper or fail. Where I come from there was never any size limit or bag limit until about a decade ago they put a 10 cm length limit and introduced a bag limit of 100 fish per day. The place is awash in perch, over populated and stunted, the biggest I ever caught was about 12" out of thousands and can count on both hands those over 10" In spring the weed beds become a gelatinous mass of thousands of skeins of perch eggs. There the culture is different, perch are regarded as trash fish, when caught most just fling them into the bushes and get annoyed with them. Very few people target them and even fewer eat them. I caught thousands of them as a kid and never ever ate one. On the other hand we would target white perch, basically a bit larger on average than yellows, no yellow and green barring, they're bright silver with a charcoal striped lateral line. I ate lots of those, and after moving west and being fed yellow perch found they taste the same, yummy! I can't believe all the meals of delicious yellow perch I missed out on because we didn't know any better.
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