Quote:
Originally Posted by 858king
I agree! Trout are easy and can get rather boring when you have 20 ponds to choose from and only one species of one genus...no brook trout, no brown trout, just rainbows. And then they get muddy, and they don't reproduce. Why not stock some of the ponds with perch? Way cheaper. And there's the whole "overpopulation" thing but if you get people fishing for them, they don't overpopulate.
I don't get the trout thing. And it's not like I can't catch them -- far from it!
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Unfortunately you are not up to speed on the facts insofar as over population of perch are concerned.
You can't catch enough of them angling to keep them from over populating. Even with high harvest...with no natural predators they breed exponentially. This is a simple fact. There is no chance the fishermen alone can keep up with the reproducing perch. Take a calculator and start with 100 perch...50 are females. At 7-8 inches they lay 30,000+ eggs. Give the eggs a 5% survival rate. Remove what you think is reasonable. With no limits on our lake and some pretty significant fishing pressure...I figure 5000 a winter and 5000 a summer is on the very high end (over estimate). After year 3 of the first season the new recruits start to spawn. The past two years the same spawning occurred. Thereafter spawning continues. As the population increases (and it will) the size decreases. As the size decreases...fishing pressure decreases. I can bet you 100 perch that you would rather catch five 10 inch trout than 100 4 inch perch any day of the week.
Guys like you say misinformation such as this and some poor excuses for human beings take it one step further and polute and vandalize lakes by putting perch in them. You must be careful in what you say for assumptions. There is not one single instance where perch have ever been a single source fishery. They don't co-exist well with any other fish other than pike and walleye. Put and take lakes due to limited size make horrible pike and walleye fisheries.
Unfortunately your idea does not work. One alternative to your idea would be to have more lakes with multiple trout species...brookies and rainbows, Rainbows and browns, splake and tiger trout...etc.
Sincerely.
Sun
P.S. Finsnfeathers... Just so you know the idea of moving perch around has come up many times before. Unfortunately disease and inbreeding concerns makes this unfeasible from our lake.