Mother Sucker

[jtaylor]

I walked the bow last night since I forgot got the house keys and my girlfriend was at a dinner. I found a nice pool with some decent sized fished. Unfortunately they were sucker fish. Which in my mind are the most boring fish to catch. There was about 6 of these suckers and maybe it's just me but I haven't seen so many sucker fish on the bow in my life.

 

Questions:

 

- Has anyone else been catching more suckers as of late?

 

-Do you think that the suckers are going to have an impact on the trout population?

 

 

From what I hear suckers love to eat other fish eggs and after the floods the last thing the trout population needs is a bunch of mother suckers eating the eggs.

 

Cheers,

 

JT

[reevesr1]

I guess it would be possible that suckers survived the flood better than the trout so proportionally there are more now, which actually may not be surprising since they are native aren't they? And do they eat eggs? Not surprising either, but so do most (if not all) trout species.

 

But there are certainly no more suckers this year than the year before, or the year before that? Not that I"ve noticed. Now that I think of it, seems to me there may be less? Or maybe I haven't been fishing water that they hang out in as much (which is more likely). Whatever the case, we shouldn't do anything about it. If they've survived the flood better than trout, and have some small impact on the future trout population (which I doubt), so be it. Good for the suckers.

[scel]

I usually catch a couple of suckers from November-March. However, during the summer, I had never caught any. I have caught 2 in the last 30 days. I have walked 20 km of shoreline. I have seen 5 dead fish. 3/5 have been small suckers. I am not sure what this means (I could have encountered the only 3 dead suckers that succumbed to the flooding).

 

My inclination---the cleansing of the riverbed probably hurt the sucker population. While suckers are native, they are not capable of handling the super fast, high water. They are, however, resilient, and the flood will not seriously impact the population.

[cheeler]

No matter which section we were on the vast majority of fish rescued with TU and SRD right after the floods were suckers and whitefish. The populations have always been there but as fly fisherman we typically spend our time trying to fish the trout water; the flood mixed everything up.

 

Trout also eat the eggs of the suckers.

[jtaylor]

Thanks for the responses