A Nice Northwoods Black Crappie

Monday, November 24, 2014
Size: 
14.5 inches

Caught 30 feet down in 45 feet of water on a jigging spoon tipped with a crappie minnow.

Comments

andy's picture

That was just a very large and beautifully marked fish.  It made all those 12-13 inchers look small!

Eli's picture

That's a hog!

Can only imagine how old a northern Crappie that size would be. They're so few and far between, unfortunately.

Someone pulled a 16.5" from a lake 2 hours north of Ottawa two years ago. Photographed next to a measuring tape and all; I couldn't believe it. 

I'm yet to break the 13'' mark. Maybe this winter.

Eli

 

 

Corey's picture

 

 

Crappie length at age...

Here is a scatterplot chart of the aging results for 85,000 black crappies from Minnesota, plotted against their length.

 

As you can see, a fish that size can be from 5-18 years old, and after reaching that size, they pretty much stop growing anymore. They put all of their energy into reproduction.

 

I was thinking about saving some scales to figure out how old the fish we were catching were; I assume they are pretty fast growers in that lake because big numbers of them seem to appear out of nowhere.

 

 

 

Outdoors4life's picture

Wow I tend to forget that crappies get that old. Corey thanks for spewing out that raw data every once in a while! I love seeing it.

It is all perspective!

Acer Home Inspections

Corey's picture

Honestly, it's not rocket science. I used to have a cheapo Fisher-Price digital microscope that was plenty good to read scales with. And I sent those burbot otoliths in to get aged a couple of years back. We roughfishers should get set up for reading our own scales; I'd like to know how old a 20 inch shorthead redhorse is.

 

I'll run a scatter-plot length/age regression for a single lake sometime; that's a much cooler dataset to work with.

 

 

 

 

Rank Amateur's picture

Are you KIDDING me? GET OUT! What a fish! That's an amazing, AMAZING size for a crappie! I catch them all the time around here, but they never grow to be much. Locally here in southern New England, they are small, pesky trash-fish. Congratulations.

I smell feet. Or is that the fish you caught today?