By JOE GORDEN
The Tribune-Democrat
April 26, 2008 11:31 pm
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Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission biologists set their trap nets in tiny Colver Reservoir last week and came up with some catches of impressive proportions.
“What we found was what I would consider a high-quality fishery for bluegill, saugeye, walleye, black crappie and yellow perch,” said Rick Lorson, area fisheries manager for the Southwest Region. “I would say, however, even though we handled a lot of nice fish, the numbers were only average. However, when you consider that water body is only 75 acres, I would not expect a lot. Quality-size fish is a good thing.”
The reservoir is primarily a pan-fishery with walleye, walleye-sauger hybrids and largemouth bass as top predators. Lorson said the fishery there has gotten better over the years.
“I think it has improved,” he said. “When we were in there in 2000, it was early in the addition of a couple of those species. But, this is not an overly productive lake. It has kind of moderate fertility. Alkalinity collected this week was 21, which was a little higher than we had seen there previously. But we consider a productive lake to be anything over 20 milligrams per liter of alkalinity, so it is on the low end.”
Lorson said the trap nets yielded a lot of suckers of good size and quality panfish.
“It’s rare that we see as many bluegills as we did over 8 inches,” he said. “We had good numbers of black crappies. The majority of fish we handled were over 9 inches, and the dominant class was around 10 or 11 inches. Those are not huge crappies, but nice fish.
“We didn’t handle as many yellow perch as we did crappies, but we did see some nice ones. We saw ample numbers over 9 inches, but not a lot of them.”
The fish commission was especially interested in the return of walleyes and saugeyes. It has been stocking both in Colver Reservoir since 1996 in an effort to determine which fares better.
But walleye are produced in Pennsylvania while saugeyes have been obtained from other states. Now, concern about disease has cut off the supply of saugeye, so if Pennsylvania is to continue stocking them, it will have to begin producing them here.
Before launching such a project, the fish commission wants to see if it is worthwhile.
And based on last week’s survey, it isn’t.
“We handled seven saugeyes total, and most of them were 22 to 24 inches,” Lorson said. “We also sampled 18 walleye, the majority of those fish over 20 inches, with the largest being 26 inches. Even though walleye were stocked twice as many years, they seem to be doing as well as the saugeye. They are easier to produce, so it looks as though we may manage only for walleye in the future.”
The lake also produced a number of brown bullheads, a few golden shiners and a couple of largemouth bass.
“We didn’t handle more than three or four in the nets,” Lorson said of bass. “And, we did handle a 20-inch one. That’s a nice fish.”
But bass are not a targeted fish during spring trap-netting because it is not a reliable sample method for them. Bass are surveyed by night electrofishing, which is the next step in the fish commission’s look at Colver Reservoir. That’s scheduled for the week of May 27, when the water should be warmer and bass should be easier to find in the shallows.
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