03-02-2007, 10:51 PM
[black]I received some information that sheds considerable light on chubs and perch. P[/black][size 1][black][size 2]erch outcompete the chubs. They are completely different in their life history. The chubs in Starvation boomed for only a couple years about 25 years ago when their only competition was rainbow trout. They have had little recruitment at all since then. Chubs are very long lived, over 30 years. Chubs have not had a boom and bust cycle. They simply sustained the walleye fishery for over twenty years from the initial boom. Utah chub fry are also very vulnerable to predation. You can see them floating in the surface film in the fall and they are almost completely consumed in their first year.
Perch tend to be short lived and will reproduce at a rate so high it overwhelms predators. Sometimes the boom is so huge, the main forage for the juvenile perch is other juvenile perch. This is not sustainable, and combined with increased predator numbers leads to population crashes in western reservoirs. The discovery of illegally planted perch in Starvation put a halt to the aggressive effort by the UDWR to reduce the walleye population (with the hope that in doing so the chub population might have a chance to recover) because it was apparent that any chub fry would be eaten by the newly discovered perch. [/size][/black] [/size]
[signature]
Perch tend to be short lived and will reproduce at a rate so high it overwhelms predators. Sometimes the boom is so huge, the main forage for the juvenile perch is other juvenile perch. This is not sustainable, and combined with increased predator numbers leads to population crashes in western reservoirs. The discovery of illegally planted perch in Starvation put a halt to the aggressive effort by the UDWR to reduce the walleye population (with the hope that in doing so the chub population might have a chance to recover) because it was apparent that any chub fry would be eaten by the newly discovered perch. [/size][/black] [/size]
[signature]