Starvation hard deck report

[TubeDude]

The winter of 2013 was about the last time any of us really had good perch fishing in Starvation.  There were reports in early 2014...as the ice came off the lake...of large numbers of dead perch washing up all around the lake.  

 Even so, unless ALL the perch died somehow, and even given some of the terrible water years, I would have thought a population recovery (if not a size recovery) would have been well under way.   I wonder why not? 

Perch are prolific.  It took only a 3-4 years after PV perch crashed for a bunch of 10.5" fish to show up all of a sudden one year, and by the next year we were back to standard, even classic PV perch.  In the meantime, while the perch were gone, the crappie started growing, but topped out about 10".

That's the big question.  Perch were supposedly never planted in Starvation...knowingly and legally.  But their population exploded and within a short time they were everywhere in the lake...in big numbers...and growing to good sizes (over 14").  But since the dieoff they have never made a big comeback. 

A couple of possibles.  When the perch first showed up in Starvy there were still a lot of chubs in the biomass.  But perch have done well in a lot of lakes where they had only their own young as a primary food source. So that is not likely a cause.  Secondly, there is a large population of perch-eating walleyes in Starvy.  It is possible that they eat enough of the perch to keep the perch population low. 

A more likely limiting predator might be smallmouths.  They were a major cause of the decline in perch in Deer Creek.  There were always a lot of perch in Deer Creek until smallies were introduced.  Young smallies take a major toll on newly hatched perchlets every year...slurping up thousands before they ever have a chance to grow.  And Starvy has a big population of both small smallies and seegar wallies.  Those two species eat lots of perchlets at all stages of their life cycle. 

Before the big crash there was a major harvest of perch by anglers...both from open water and through the ice.  But angling pressure has never been proven as a cause of major perch declines.  Natural predation always counts for a much greater toll on perch numbers.  In Yuba reservoir there was a study that projected that walleyes ate at least 10 times more perch than anglers ever harvested. 

About two or three years before the crash at Starvy, there was a similar dieoff at Jordanelle.  But that was supposedly the result of a virus or parasite attack.  Results...the same.  It has been slow to recover, but it has done better than Starvation. 

I don't claim to know all the answers.  Heck, I'm not even sure what the questions are sometimes.