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Cranberry Pond Die-off Story


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A few years ago, I was fishing along edgemere with my son and we watched with regularity the perch come up to the surface and mouth the air and swim in circles on their backs. Not just a few but hundreds at a time all at once. Then that would submerge and not be seen for a while and it would happen again over and over.

Puzzling, but we figured it was a lack of oxygen to support the huge population of fish spawning there, perch, walleye, carp, all seem to converge in that pond in spring.

Shallow water, thick ice, loss of sunlight contribute to plant dieoff. Those ponds are relatively stagnant during winter hard freeze. There are pockets of water that move in spring that has little oxygen and somtimes the large fish population gets into them.

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Most of the fish that are dead on cranberry are just shad, i mean sure thier are some largemouth, smallmouth, walleye, carp, bowfin, yellow perch, white bass, bullhead, and channel cats, but that happens every winter. The majority of the dead fish were shad, i saw hundreds of them. I didnt see one pike though which was alittle strange. The larger die off just came from the cold winter we had. The ice is thicker and the oxygen levels were lower, its as simple as that. I dont think we have anything to worry about.

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