Exchange with Chris Penn -- Willard Bay catfish

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As I have postulated before, the predators in Willard are forced to forage on whatever is available during months when the shad are non-existent or too small for worthwhile pursuit.  Over the years I have caught wipers, walleyes and cats with all kinds of non-shad stomach contents.  As Chris pointed out, yearling perch, crappies, and bluegills are often tummy tidbits for the predators.  But even small catfish and residual log perch and spottail shiners also show up at times.  But one of the biggies...especially for cats...are crawdads.  I find them in both wipers and walleyes during lean times, but in cats year round when water levels are up and the "mudbugs" can use the flooded rocks to spawn lots of young.





In the "good ol' days"  water levels remained high up into the rocks all year...making for steady year-round concentrations of crawdads for cats.  And before shad arrived...and started slurping up all the zooplankton needed by the young of most species to grow beyond fingerling size...crappie prospered.  They had good spawning conditions all around the lake every spring...and the young had abundant zooplankton.  Today the almost yearly water drawdowns...resulting in poor spawning conditions...and the reduction of zooplankton by shad (to feed the young) results in low crappie populations.  Then factor in the heavy meat harvest each year in the marinas by the happy harvesters and there are not as many large crappie surviving to spawn.



Bottom line is that the overall ecology of the lake has forever changed with both the addition of new species (shad and wipers) and the increased demands of downstream water users to keep the water levels wildly fluctuating.  Some fishing is better.  Others not so much.