Yellow perch

[Broad Bill]

Went out with a few friends today, drilled some holes. Action was a bit on the slow side but friend Mike caught this beautiful yellow perch. 15", 1.6 lbs. Biggest perch I've ever seen, girth on the fish was pretty impressive. Congrats Mike on a PB, beautiful fish!

[dales529]

Nice perch Mike! Thanks for posting BB

[hammer4reel]

When I first started fishing spruce run in the late 70’s , we caught big perch all the time .
Many times the perch were nicer than the largemouths we caught .
Don’t understand why it’s no longer like that

[bunker dunker]

same thing with mountain lake.we would catch giant yellows,up to 15in and then they put in the muskies and that was that.nice perch,congrats!!!!

[Broad Bill]

Thanks BD! Same thing seems to be happening with this lake, there's been a recent build up of pickerel which might be contributing to the YP decline. The YP you catch are jumbos but there's a noticeable decline of smaller fish for some reason.

One thing I read is the impact of phytoplankton and zooplankton on YP. Phytoplankton are formed based on water quality, lake nutrients and photosynthesis (sun light). Zooplankton eat phytoplankton and zooplankton are almost exclusively what YP fry feed on in the first year of their life cycle. In the absence of zooplankton, they'll starve until attaining an age where they can forage on larger invertebrates and herring. Maybe some sort of imbalance has occurred with the plankton population. The blue gill population is strong and bluegill fry basically depend on zooplankton as well so that would challenge that assumption. Why would YP be impacted but not blue gills. The largemouth population is strong but the YP population has noticeably taken a nosedive with younger age classes which isn't a good sign. These jumbo perch can lay 100,000 eggs a year so somethings changed just not sure what.