The following occurred at my Uncles farm the other day. The farm is located just outside the town of Sadler in Grayson county.

Anyways the recent rains caused Mustang creek to go way out of it's banks like so many other waterways in North Texas. The floodwaters played the devil with his fence down in the bottom land of the farm, so a friend was down there working on the fence when he heard a lot of splashing in the creek. He told Uncle Art there were a bunch of big fish in the creek. My uncle figured they were carp and gar because that's all he thought ever made it up this far in the Mustang. He went down there about 2 days later and walked up on a pool that had between 40-50 dead stripers in it. He said they ranged in size from 2 - 5 lbs are so. Now is it common for stripers to make it this far up a creek after the spawn? Could some still be spawning? in a normal year this creek doesn't flow all the time, but it does have steep deep banks that would hold a lot of water in a flood. Why do you think they died so quickly. Can you imagine how many must have been up there that didn't get landlocked and made it back to Texoma. Below is a google maps page placed on the area the creek runs through I'm talking about. From there it flows about 4 miles to the Hagerman and into the Big Mineral arm.
Mustang Creek

Water got too hot on a few sunny days before the current rain and zapped all of the oxygen out of the water along with the oxygen use of the fish if they were in a small enough water hole? End of their life cycle? Weather conditions determine the spawn so it is possible they held off as long as they could. Could also be the equivalent of a lake turning over with or without the rain?

Yeah, good point. Also a fair amount of rotting plant material in the water too robbing oxygen.

That's a good point. I forgot about how much vegetation and trees are in the water now. When certain plants are submerged/stressed like that, some release or give off chemicals that become harmful to residents of the water.

Here's my favorite website regarding such things.
Auquaplant
It's very educational.

Stripers will run way up the major creeks on texoma when there is current! Many of the stripers that washed thru the dam still have not spawned. I cleaned two last weekend with green eggs like she was just now ready and another with a big sack of yellow eggs.

A similar story....Back in the 80's there was a great population of Walleye here. There was a BIG flood in 89 or so. The Walleye followed their instincts and went with the flow of the spillway. Our biologist got a "You have to see this" call. He went to a deep hole three miles below the spillway and found 5-8 thousand dead Walleye (2-8 pounds) in the pool. He was just sick about it.

Well I'll Be. I'm surprised to hear that.

What a terrible loss.