Are we including my self keeping to many crappie ? I see everybody limiting out just about every day and I keep
everything thats legal every time I fish granted I dont get to go fishing that often. In the future is it possible we will run out of crappie?

No! But crappie do have cycles, where population has peaks and valleys about every 6 years.

Environmental factors will impact them more (positively and negatively) more than anglers. For every person on here that says they limited out, there's 10 that got skunked.

I think so. Yall need to quit fishing for them so there will be more for me.......

I remember reading a TPWD report that the mortality of crappie due to fishermen is much less than the mortality due to natural causes, i.e. due to other species eating them, etc.

I've seen way too many ponds taken over by them when introduced to believe they could ever be in danger.Crappie are quite prolific

Unless folks are gill netting them by the 1000s, no. Just isn’t possible. They spawn like rabbits. Lake conditions play a much bigger factor on their numbers than we ever could. There’s a reason why crappie management programs on ponds are to haul them out by the cooler full.

No...

Yep. . . I’m one of those 10 that stink really badly😁😁😁

no

No, I fish for them a few times a week. Mostly catch and release, I see cycles and more.so in smaller lakess.

what I would like to know, is what metrics were used to establish a 25 fish limit per person. why 25.. why not 24 or 26, or 19 or 100? at one time there was no limit.. it would be interesting to know why that changed, and the particulars and reasoning for the 25 fish limit...
my thinking is those concerned abt crappie being overharvested should not post limits of crappie.. the more limits that show up on social media, the more the folks that manage the fisheries will think, everything is great, the crappie are thriving, people are posting limits from there almost every day.. even though its usually fishing guides, or hardcore lake rats that are doing it, it will still give an impression of everything is dandy...
I for certain can say that of the 3 lakes I normally fish, every one of them is nowhere near as good as they were 5 to 7 years ago..is it due to long droughts and low water periods, is it due to increased fishing pressure, or the incredible sonar technology that came out around 6 years ago? I dont know. I have to search alot more areas, and alot more cover and structure than I used to to find fish and when I do, theres usually not as many crappie on each spot as years past.

If your concerned with running out of fish, put some self-imposed limits on yourself. Maybe add a few catfish and/or bass to the pot... Don't wait for the government to tell you what to do. I do know that one of the lakes I fish has too many crappie in it. TPWD ran surveys on it for several years and found the majority of fish were mature and under 10'' and there isn't enough food source to change it. So now we keep the first 25 no matter the length. We will see how long it takes to turn it around. Even with a high mortality rate, they do a purdy good job of reproducing.

I tried to help a land owner control his crappie population. 35 acres. (Black crappie) I removed at least 1500 over a summer- he had another guide doing the same and had people fishing it often trying to get them out of it. Lots of mature fish, few under 10”. He stocked some bass…within 2 years the pond had more crappie in it then when he started. He had to use Rotenone to remove them to start over. The pics he sent me absolutely blew my mind. Thousands of dead crappie of all sizes. Including some larger than anything I ever saw come out of it. If you can’t control them in 35 acres, how can we do damage in 20,000 acres?

The only time I’ve seen a crappie population hurt was on a small >300 acre lake. One winter we caught a bunch of trophies and the next winter I ran a trip on it and there were thousands of cormorants. The crappie are not healthy anymore- most have wounds. No shad to be found.

Fork of the 90's I just launched at 154 Bridge....dropped TM....and usually only made it 6 or 8 sections and 2 hours before I had 25...... can't do that anymore and haven't been able to for more than a decade

Crappie no!! Big ones. Maybe?

There is a couple spots on a lake I like that most of the years seems to have 1000s. There are probably 20 people that know them that I can think of. 5 or so of us have combined to pull probably couple 1000 crappie off them in the last couple years and u think there were more and bigger this year than before. I don't know how fast they breed but it seems endless

White crappie are so prolific that TPWD no longer stocks them. They say if a lake has even a remnant population they will repopulate the lake entirely when. Conditions improve.

Not from me this year!

I suck as a crappie fisherman. I have only ever caught one limit of crappie in my life. Fortunately, there was a picture taken of it. If you check the date, you'll see it was over 10 years ago. Sorry folks, but if you need to control the population, don't take me fishing with you.

The populations can change from year to year, but one thing that caused them to be bigger was the 10" minimum and 25 fish limit. I am 100% convinced that caused more people to catch bigger fish than any other factor. Of course, that was probably nothing compared to the impact of modern electronics.

Bigger fish would probably result from higher harvest limits and shorter length limits. But the amount of people who would ever limit would be low. Very few fisherman ever sniff a limit.

Water fluctuations can cause issues with the crappie spawn. Males watch the nest for some time after the female crappie lays the eggs.

If the water goes down the male and the fry fail because the water is to shallow. The male can't stay and the cormorants, gulls, and Herons get the fry. If the water goes up the male has to much water to defend and the perch, catfish etc feast on them. Stable water levels produce crappie. The male defending the nest is the key. Fluctuations in water levels cause crappie spawns to fail.

Hit some dock lights this time of year and approach quietly. You will be amazed at the amount of fry from all types of fish you will see.

Crappie are like hogs. You can't control them with a gun or a rod and reel. Traps and nets yes.

As long as there is enclosed docks with overhead doors in the front there will be crappie. Next time you go to the lake take your live scope and look under enclosed docks with overhead doors in the front of the slip. Plenty of uncatchable crappie under there.

FIRST OF ALL, I HAVE A LIVESCOPE . I ONCE SAID I WOULD NEVER OWN ONE (NEVER SAY NEVER) I HAVE LIVED ON A LAKE SINCE 1990. IN THIS LAKE I HAVE ESTABLISHED OVER A HUNDRED BRUSH PILES. I STOPPED THIS PRACTICE 3YRS AGO SINCE THE LOCATIONS BECAME SO OVER FISHED DUE TO SO MANY PEOPLE WHO ONCE COULD NOT CATCH A FISH IN A BARREL .MAGICALLY SINCE SPOTLIGHTING.CAME ON THE SCENE.THEY ARE ACCOMPLISHED ANGLER. IM SURE MOST OF THESE PEOPLE HAVE NEVER DONE ANYTHING TO ENHANCE THE HABITAT FOR FISH (OF COURSE THAT WOULD REQUIRE AN EFFORT AND WORK) IT AMAZES ME THAT YOUNG FOLKS JUST DON'T SEEM TO HAVE A GREAT DEAL OF COMMON SENSE.. IT SEEMS TO ME IT WOULDN'T TAKE A GENIUS TO UNDERSTAND THAT IF YOU ARE TAKING A 100% MORE OF SOMETHING AWAY THAN WHAT WAS ONCE THE NORM THAT IT WOULD HAVE A NEGATIVE IMPACT, NOT TO MENTION THE CULLING THAT IS TAKING PLACE. NOW TO MY POINT! SINCE THE ADVANCED POPULARITY OF "SPOTLIGHTING" THE QUALITY OF CRAPPIE HAS DECLINED EVER SO SLOWLY. ONLY THOSE WHO COULD CATCH FISH PRE "SPOTLIGHTING" WOULD BE ASTUTE TO THE CHANGE. UNFORTUNATELY WE ARE DEALING WITH THE GENERATION THAT IS FROM THE "PARTICIPATION TROPHY GENERATION". YEP, I'M AN OLD MAN (75), I'VE LIVED LONG ENOUGH TO EXPERIENCE THE POSITIVE EFFECTS AND THE NEGATIVE EFFECTS THAT TECHNOL0GY CAN HAVE ON FISHING AND HUNTING. THAT'S CALLED WISDOM. MOST ON THESE SITES WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT OLD ENOUGH TO EXPERIENCE THE PAST 75 YRS. EVEN THE PRO BASS FISHERMEN ARE BEGINNING TO QUESTION THE USE OF LIVE SCOPE .MOST OF THEM MAKE MONEY OFF OF SPONSORING THE COMPANIES WHO MANUFACTURE THE UNITS..OBVIOUSLY, THOSE WHO ARE MAKING MONEY WITH THESE PRODUCTS AND THOSE THAT CANT CATCH FISH WITHOUT THE TECHNOLOGY WILL ATTACK THIS POST. BE VERY CAREFUL TO NOT DESTROY THE SPORT THAT YOU CLAIM TO LOVE. LETS NOT DESTROY WHAT WE WISH FOR OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN. ONE LASTSTORY. A COUPLE YRS AGO WHILE FISHING ON MY PIER WITH MY DOWN SYNDROME GRANDSON , I NOTICED THAT I BEGAN TO SEE CRAPPIE FLOATING UNDER MY PIER. I LOOKED A COUPLE PIERS DOWN WIND AND NOTICE 2 MEN CULLING FISH FROM AN ICE CHEST. AFTER A WHILE THEY CAME BACK TO MY PIER AND AFTER TALKING TO THEM I DISCOVERED THAT THEY WEREN'T CULLING BECAUSE OF LIMIT. (50 LIMIT IN LA) THEY WERE CULLING FOR SIZE. MOST PEOPLE DON'T WANT OT CLEAN 50 CRAPPIE. THINK ABOUT THAT

Why are you yelling

Livescope can’t make a bad fisherman into a crappie killing machine overnight. I don’t need livescope to stack the boat. Most of the time once you catch the first 10-15 fish off a brush pile they stop biting anyway. I can down scan a pile that looks like a Christmas tree on the graph with fish and once you catch the active fish they quit. Simple as that. I’ve caught limits from the boat and the bank. Even with livescope, 90% of fisherman won’t even come close to a limit. Even then I’m not sure how much difference it really makes. You still have to know the pattern and presentation that’s going to work. I don’t think people should be wasting fish, but I still don’t think fisherman are gonna put fish at risk because most people just simply don’t have the knowledge and the type of attention to detail it takes to catch a limit every single time.

This has got to be one of the most uneducated post I have ever seen anyone make and completely wrong.

Livescope has turned many a fisherman into a crappie killer that couldn’t catch but a few fish before it now can limit almost ever trip, I know several of them, guides also.

I have been fishing for crappie for 45 years, waded with a fly rod and caught them on jigs in the 70’sand rarely ever saw anyone jigging for crappie. Now they make jig poles just for that, they did not back in the day, used to have the lakes to ourselves back then, Wally Marshall and few other guys changed that later on.

Then when Livescope came around people started slaying crappie that never could triangulate brush or used 2d sonar then later gps waypoints to locate brush. Now all they have to do is put Livescope in the water and view out 100 feet and can find every piece of brush around, your delusional if you think Livescope did not change crappie fishing.

My information comes from experience, not what someone told me…

My ears hurt. . .

He's used to yelling at the clouds

This has been a very entertaining thread.

Like some of the other posts above I have been Crappie fishing for years (and years). The size of the Crappie during the spring spawn this year are smaller than ever before. If I catch a big egg full female during the spawn back she goes. The bull Crappie taste the same. With live scan fishermen target the largest fish in the brush which are usually female. There are enough videos and pictures on the net to support this fact. You don't see many pictures with a limit of Crappie containing 10 and 11 inch fish.

With continued use of live scan we may need to implement a Lake Grenada type rule where only so many Crappie can be over X inches long. I have a replica of my three pound Crappie hanging on my wall. Unless we reduce the removal of the large female egg laying machines from our lakes that opportunity for a three pound Crappie may not exist.

I have a little bit of a perspective on this. I don’t crappie fish all the time, but this year and last, I have been trying to focus more on catching them I fish from a kayak, so I’m not all over the lakes searching out your brush piles.

I have a Garmin graph (not livescope) on my kayak, and it’s the best thing I ever did. Before the rain, for example, I caught crappie till it was ridiculous on a submerged bridge while there were 5 boats around - some with livescope - One guy with TWO livescopes on his boat - and guys were going nuts at the crappie I was catching.

Some of those fish were 15”! I gave them all away to the other folks, but even I was amazed at the fish I was catching, while the two boats with livescope were hardly catching any! I think it was partly that I wasn’t anchored, and I would rock my kayak back-and-forth, giving the jig a little motion.

So, just because someone has livescope doesn’t mean they are draining the lake!

JR

I may have been the worst crappie fisherman in the world. I wouldn't even try other than when they went to the banks. Now I regularly load the boat with big ones. It has made me a damn genius the last few years lol

I believe that any crappie can grow to 3lbs. some make it some dont. To me, that tells me that a sow female is just a good catch, therefore its thrown in the livewell. I just dont believe that a 3lb crappie is good genetics. They all have the same genetics. Its how they are raised, the water they are in, the predators, the overall fish health, the prolifics of breeding.

I’ve been saying it for years and I feel we really need to do something about it. Limits are huge.
To me it seems simple because of the advances in sonar like SI and livescope for example The fishing has changed tremendously. There are more people are able to find and locate some fish and catch them. Populations of people have grown as well especially here in Texas. With high school/college bass teams fishing popularity has grown and technology and advancements in the sport but yet limits remain the same.

1.anglers know and see more with sonar
2. Online knowledge boomed w internet
3. People population has skyrocketed
4. Limits same forever

No brainer I’d call it
Good luck getting a change I’ve been a guide for 30 years and they won’t listen to me

TPWD doesn't care about crappie. If a lake gets overfished, people will stop going and the population will recover. That was their statement a couple of years ago anyhow. Long live the ditch pickle!

Fish til theyre all gone. then quit,...

Crappie aren’t going to be over harvested. It’s just not going to happen. All the anecdotal evidence is well and good but the limits are designed so fish can spawn several times before they are harvested, so the fish are protected. Head north to Oklahoma, it doesn’t even have a length limit and I’ve personally seen the size and numbers of fish they have in a lot of their lakes. My anecdotal evidence is I was loading the boat without livescope, have continued to load the boat without it several years after it came out, and I’ll continue to load the boat with fish for many years because there are more than enough of them to go around. Heck, I’ve caught more than enough fishing from the bank. There just isn’t a shortage of them and the limits are designed to allow them to reproduce before they’re kept.

Back in the early 60s, the theory by TPW biologists was, you can't over fish the bass population in one of these big lakes. I know because my Dad was a Game Warden and he talked to the biologist often and I listened in. Limit then was 15, no size limit. Then 10, then 5 and all kinds of size limits. Crappie are different spawners than bass or sure. But as stated above, everything happening in the past few years has only made catching easier not harder and way more people on the water.
So the theory now is we can't over fish the crappie population. At least until we do.

I still experience (and talk to many others) my share of days where I just can't find and/or catch crappie (even equipped with FFS). I'm not the best fisherman, but I'm also not terrible. Even when there are good days, rarely do I bring home more than 15. It's just hard for me to imagine being able to over fish the crappie population. These lakes here in North Texas are just so loaded with habitat; there's so many places for those fish to go. Also, in contrast to public opinion, I really don't usually encounter very many crappie fishermen out there (I fish Lavon mostly). I see more people targeting catfish, sand bass and black bass.

And I have been known to keep one in the livewell, just in case its a slow day and YaYa is fish hungry...

This may explain why I catch more black crappie than whites. This never use to be the case.

White crappie are more prolific, but it’s all relative. They both breed like rabbits and some lakes the pH and water clarity favors one species over the other. I don’t think either are really stocked in any substantial numbers and to be honest I doubt they even needed to be stocked in the first place. I do know some lakes like lavon have had a major black crappie boom here in the last probably 6-8 years, but I doubt that has anything to do with the stocking.

I bought some crappie from a fish farm a few years back to stock my pond. The owner of the fish farm told me that white crappie are natural to lakes and rivers. He said black crappie are not natural and only come from fish farms. The black crappie that are in the lakes and rivers escaped from stock ponds when they flooded; or are descendants of crappie that escaped from stock ponds. That is why there are not as many black crappie as there are white crappie. I have no idea if that is factual, but that is what he told me.

All you have to do is go into TPWD.com and run a search on stocking to find out what lakes were stocked with what species and when. You might be surprised

Don’t smoke whatever that guy is smoking. Dumbest load of BS I’ve ever heard. Black crappie are native across most of the eastern half of the US and a lot of their range overlaps with white crappie. I do want to say florida only has black crappie (in the native range of course). Now, there are places out west where they only have black crappie, but most of the fish in the lakes out that way weren’t native to begin with. Long story short, black crappie and white crappie are both native to texas and most of the eastern half of the US. The abundance of each species in our Texas lakes trends with geography. For the most part, the further you head east the more black crappie there are. This isn’t always the case, but it’s a good ballpark rule of thumb. Generally lakers with clearer water favor black crappie and white crappie tend to tolerate swift currents a tad better.

my 2 cents.... I lived on cedar creek for 20 years.For the first 15 years 95% of crappie I caught were Black. Then year by year it started to equal out to the poing I caught more White crappie , about 75% white. Why? I dont know.Articles I read said they like different water quality, temps, flow but I dont seem thats true on cc..

Lavon was the other way around with white crappie. Rarely ever caught a black crappie up until about 7-8 years ago, but one year we started catching a ton of little ones, the next year 7-8” ones, now if you go out you can put a limit on the boat an 3/4 will be black crappie. It also has to do with how you fish I think. I catch a lot more black crappie on brush and rocky type structures and oftentimes find the white crappie on vertical timber. Also find it common that white crappie are found more on the upper end of lakes where the water can be dirtier.