TTFishon said:
I don't think the bass will take over Crane or Wickiup. They haven't yet and they've been there since I was a teenager or maybe longer. That was 25 to 30 years ago.
First. Don't look up my shorts!
Second, this is an average fish from Crane Prairie with the photo taken 40 years ago this year. Before Bass.
Sorry that you have to turn your head but I can't seem to rotate the image. It's not a huge fish but the lake was stuffed with fish this size on up. In those days. 8-10 pound trout were a daily possibility and the lake was fished hard with lots of people staying in the surrounding area and spending money locally.
c_chickens and most garage biologists don't seem to understand that a lake is like a pasture in that it can only grow so many pounds of fish per acre of lake and no more. If you have a strong salmonid population that has a good food source that doesn't mean that you can throw another species of fish into the habitat and it will do as well. To simplify how this works, say you can grow 100 pounds of fish per acre. That can be 200- .5 pound fish, 100- 1 pound fish or 50- 1 pound trout and 50- 1 pound bass. Because you can grow 100 pounds of fish per acre doesn't mean you can grow 100-1 pound trout and 100-1 pound bass if they both utilize the same food source which bass and trout do. Putting bass into the Bend lakes reduced the number of trout and the trout fishing experience from something world class to only OK.
By dumping bass into the lake, one or a very few at most, people make a decision for the entire population about what the fishing experience will be in that water which will be diminished by have competing species in the lake.
The same thing happened in Calif. at our Davis lake with bass and northern pike. Tons of public money has been spent to eradicate the pike but nothing has been done about the bass. A lake that used to have 10,000 people from as far away as Los Angeles (400 miles) fishing every weekend and catching very large trout has been reduced to a basically mediocre fishery and a depressed local economy.
If you want to catch big bass move to Clear Lake, Calif. or the Delta and leave a beautiful trout region to species that better fit the surroundings and the state's population's point of view.
Please delete the previous post! I tried a number of times and couldn't do it.
