I went out to look at a guy’s pond today for work (he’s having some erosion issues). When I got there I saw one of the saddest sights a fisherman could ever see…
Hundreds, maybe thousands of carp lined up along the shoreline. Apparently the pond got too low last fall and the fish couldn’t survive the freeze this winter. There were a few Northerns and catfish, but it was probably 95% carp. I’m sad. Hopefully there are still some left in there, but it doesn’t look good.
It’s probably about 20 acres. Yeah, while that is a ton of carp for a lake/pond that size, they weren’t exactly small carp, so it’s not like they were stunted or anything. And either way, it would have been incredibly fun to fish there…
About 8 years ago there was a die off on the Klamath River in Northern California where over 30,000 Salmon died due to poor water quality conditions. We were fishing on the river one weekend and practially over night, 30,000 dead salmon were washing up on the beach. Horrible loss and huge loss when you consider perhaps half of those were spawning females and they each drop thousands of eggs. The actual loss was enormous.