Managing Editor
It's been almost three months since Dexter's City Pond suffered a massive fish kill, a natural event caused by a combination of factors including the extreme July heat and an algae bloom. The pond suffered the first fish kill in its history during the first weekend in July when, as Dexter Park and Recreation Director Lawson Metcalf said at the time, "We were set up to fail with conditions being what they'd been." Thousands of fish -- shad, crappie, catfish, large mouth bass and bluegill -- floated up to the pond's banks when the contributing factors deprived the pond's fish of oxygen.
On Monday morning, Department of Conservation Biologist Mike Reed set out to discover just how much damage the pond sustained from the fish kill.Reed, assisted by Fisheries Division Resource Aide Kirk Brotherton from Jackson, circled the pond, electro-shocking the waters to bring a fair sampling of fish to the surface.
That sampling, when retrieved and measured, told the story.
"We pulled out a large quantity of white crappie, bluegill, black crappie, and plenty of green sunfish," Reed said following his boat tour of the pond.
Included in the catch were significant quantities of small sunfish -- many two to three inches in length -- which revealed to Reed that fish had spawned since the July kill.
"That's positive news," Reed said of the finding. "The bad news is that we only came up with two largemouth bass, which is disappointing."
Reed and city employees had witnessed large numbers of bass on the banks of the pond following July's natural fish kill. Several catfish also fell victim to the oxygen deprivation as well.
"The larger the fish, the harder the hit," Reed explained. "Those bigger varieties of fish require more oxygen, and so typically in a situation like the city pond's kill, those are the numbers that really suffer. We were hoping to see more numbers of the bass especially."
The electro-shocking process typically does not bring many catfish to the surface, Reed explained. And so, the lack of channel cat surfacing during the Monday investigation at the pond was not surprising. The Department of Conservation will use an alternate method of detection for catfish in the months ahead. Reed said they will utilize a "hoop-net survey" to determine the volume of channel cat left in the pond.
Given the significant numbers of six, seven, and eight inch crappie netted during Monday's test of the waters, Reed was quick to encourage area anglers to fish the city pond for that variety of fish.
"These are good size fish," he explained, "and need to be harvested. They're an aggressive fish that are fun to catch right along the shoreline. I'd encourage any fishermen to come out and catch their daily limit of these crappie."
To encourage the crappie and other species to concentrate close to the shoreline, Reed will be working with local park personnel this fall to prune some of the trees that border the pond and build some brush piles close to the banks.
"The sunfish, especially crappie," Reed said, "really like that habitat."
It has been years, Reed said, since brush piles have been put into place at the pond, and those have, for the most part, deteriorated.
"If we're not careful and if we don't fish some of this size crappie out of the pond," he explained, "there will be too many for this size pond, and their growth will be stunted. We need kids and families to come out and fish for these crappie."
Reed said the Department of Conservation already has plans to restock channel cat in the city pond. With Monday's electro-shock results, they'll now plan on replacing large mouth bass as well.
"We've never had a really strong bass population in the pond," Reed noted, "and I think from what we saw today, we need to go ahead and restock."
Different species of fish have different tolerances when a fish kill occurs, Reed said.
For the most part, the biologist saw what he expected to see a few months following the natural fish kill event in July. The exception is in the number of largemouth bass. As a result, plans are already underway through the MDC's fisheries to deliver more bass to the pond.
"Overall, we've got a lot of fish in this pond," Reed concluded. "And overall, every species except the largemouth bass are pretty abundant, especially the bluegill and sunfish."
Source: http://www.dailystatesman.com/story/1897543.html
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