Got into the fish pretty good this weekend and several of the largest ones had a mouth full of what looked to be gill lice all over their tongue, gills and roof of mouth. This may have been discussed before but just wondering if others are seeing a large number of fish with this? I called the DNR Fisheries Biologists and they have recently had a lot of reports from Hartwell too. The person I talked to didn’t know as much about the fish in Murray. They didn’t feel like they were harmful to the fish but they did agree that it could be rougher on them when under O2 stress in the summer.
We ran on up river later and there were tons of dead bream floating that I think were Shell Crackers but I’m not great with identifying bream species. They were not 100% dead, they were floating on their sides with their gills barely flapping. My Dad was in the same area on Wednesday and saw maybe 3 or 4. We saw hundreds of all sizes on Saturday. The biologist seemed much more concerned when I reported seeing this and said they would have someone go check it out.
Those are gill maggots and they are pretty much found in every lake around. These fish are still ok to eat though.
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Murray fish have had hill maggots forever it seems…if I were a betting man I would say someone had been throwing a cast net and dumping the by-catch (break) or a crappie fisherman or spoon fisherman was releasing them and they weren’t swimming off…
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I don’t think all the bream were from a cast net. They were too widely distributed and evenly distributed. In other words they were spread out over several miles and they were never thick in any one place. But if you looked hard you could see one near your boat floating everywhere you went…main channel, coves didn’t matter. I was looking at pictures and they may have been red ear instead of shell crackers. The biologist said they saw something like this on Santee and they felt like it was cormorants going through big schools of them and pushing them up from down deep and them not able to handle the pressure change. Interesting theory anyway.
quote:
Originally posted by 91tiger
I don’t think all the bream were from a cast net. They were too widely distributed and evenly distributed. In other words they were spread out over several miles and they were never thick in any one place. But if you looked hard you could see one near your boat floating everywhere you went…main channel, coves didn’t matter. I was looking at pictures and they may have been red ear instead of shell crackers. The biologist said they saw something like this on Santee and they felt like it was cormorants going through big schools of them and pushing them up from down deep and them not able to handle the pressure change. Interesting theory anyway.
Saw that a month or so ago where Cloud’s Creek and Little Saluda intersect … Every 5 feet or so was another little brim … The Eagles were having a field day with them …
… it’s my Wife’s fault we HAVE to fish !!!
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