On my way home yesterday I got to thinking about all the crappie that are caught during the spawn.It seems like that would hurt the crappie population. All of the eggs not laid and what not.

I don't fish for crappie during the spawn

You'll get an interesting amount of feedback on that thought process, but long story short, crappie are incredibly prolific breeders, and if you don't want to hurt the population by harvesting females, just keep the overly aggressive males and both parties win.

As for me, I ask all clients to throw back females that are over 15" and full of eggs, unless of course that fish tops the 3lb mark, in which case we are headed to Athens for paperwork.

Laner covered it best. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The simple answer is no

Think about all of the crappie caught every year out of pines.... people come from all over and spend weeks or months at a time and whack em every single day.... you can’t out fish a lake. Especially not lakes being fed by a large river.

If you had to guess how many crappie are in lets say cedar creek. what would you guess? 5000? 8000? 2000?

Not a problem. One crappie can generate 10-50,000 fry depending on the size of the fish. If you want to help the crappie population, keep every legal LM bass you catch and lobby against your lake getting hybrid or striped bass.

I would say hundreds of thousands. My boat harvests 4,000+ crappie out of there a year, and that's at a conservative 40 keepers per trip. You have Chris Webb running more trips out there than I do, and he is on them most of the year. He pulls more fish out of there than I do. Then you have Allen Dyer, another full time guide, harvesting limit after limit. After that you have a handful of other guides making a living out there. That's just the guys doing it for money. You take all the folks who limit out day after day shooting docks in the spring, all the bank fisherman, all the weekend folks hitting them on brush, docks and bridges, and the numbers get astronomical.

Lane = 4000+
Chris Webb = 5000+
Allen Dyer = 4000+
Handful of other guides combined = 10,000+
Then all the people who harvest who knows how many crappie= A lot. A whole lot.

and there is me with my dozen a trip (If I am lucky)

It doesn’t hurt them at all. If you want to be a conservationist, throw them all back during the spawn.

I saw an article from tpwd I believe that estimates 37,000 crappie were taken out of cedar creek over a year and a half period. They grow super quick there

The most impressive thing that Livescope has shown me is just how MANY fish there are in Lake Lavon and Fork. I doubt if anyone can get an accurate guess but I suspect there are many hundreds of thousands not counting the bait fish.

Wayne

Lol I’ve marked that many in a couple of piles on cedar creek. My guess is there are millions of crappie in that lake.

This isn’t really a great approach either. Crappie are such prolific spawners that they can get stunted if there are not predator fish and anglers removing some. It’s arguable that it would actually have a negative effect on crappie fisheries if predator fish and anglers didn’t remove significant numbers every year.