Rockport Perch..Good and Bad

[MrShane]

While both crappies and yellow perch are primarily "piscivorous"...dining mainly on smaller fish...they are also omnivorous opportunists.  And even in waters where there are seemingly abundant baby perch dinners, these fish will frequently take advantage of other food tidbits...like clouds of zooplankton. 

It's just a whole food chain thing sometimes.  Baby perch search out and feed on the zooplankton, which can be anywhere from on the bottom in deep water to suspended somewhere at mid depth anywhere in the lake.  Many of us perch jerkers can attest to catching perch or crappies (or even walleyes) suspended well above bottom...both in open water and beneath the ice.  If the big perch are targeting small perch they go where the little ones go for their groceries.  But as often as not...if the bitty bites are hanging in the sometimes dense clouds...the bigger perch and crappies are just as likely to swim through the zooplankton "soup" with their mouths open...like feeding humpback whales.  And there are times when the green soup is more readily available than perchettes.   Fish for perch through the ice and it is likely some of the ones you fillet will have nothing but green goo in their innards.

Bottom line is that a healthy perch pond should have plenty of nutrients and lots of zooplankton to maintain the bottom part of the food chain.  After that, there needs to be good spawning and recruitment to keep the bigger perch well fed and capable of big spawns.  The circle of life.

Pat, since we did not make our Willard date come to fruition we better be at RP at ice off to help some 11” Perch complete their ‘Circle of life’….in to my death well.