UPDATE: UL White Bass Dieoff

[TubeDude]

Thanks for another update Pat. I'm curious, are the Loys still netting carp? If so, I would expect they might have some observations that would be useful.

I'm pretty sure their carp seining contract expired. 

Chris mentioned in his reply that he had received info from others on how poor of condition the white bass seemed to be.   I suggested that a big part of the problem might be in the food chain.  There is no large population of small species (minnows) for the white bass to feed on year round.  They glut heavily on their own young for a few months after the spring spawn, but by fall the young are too large for adult white bass to eat.  A good thing or there would be no young left each year.  I know that Utah Lake white bass and other small species will resort to slurping up midge larvae to supplant their diet when there are no young of the year to dine on.  But as in past drought years, the mud flats that produce large quantities of midge larvae are now dry or too shallow to support midge life.  So that would mean a big missing part of their potential survival diet. 

I also mentioned to Chris that a similar situation occurred at the end of a long drought period in 2004.  The white bass spawn that year was poor and the food resources were low.  Consequently the white bass population plummeted...and that messed up the predators.  In the fall of 2004 the fishing for large walleyes was great, since they were not full of other food and were more susceptible to the silly stuff thrown by anglers.  But the fish were noticeably thinner.  A lot of larger walleyes "went to bed hungry"...as the ice covered the lake.  And many of them died under the ice.  Walleye warriors fishing for them the next spring would frequently snag large dead walleye corpses that had died under the ice...and few living walleyes were caught during the "spawn".  And the few post spawn walleyes that had survived were mostly skinny.  I am attaching a picture of one that ate a minnow I was dragging for catfish in the early spring of 2005.