brian dunigan
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bd,
I’d almost bet my next month’s salary that before the week is out I will read excerpts from your post on another board.
😮
No comment.
I stand corrected. I guess the state endangered lists up north are kind of below my radar screen – most of what I read about are federally listed threatened or endangered species.
Skipjack herring (Alosa chrysochloris) are a different species from ladyfish (Elops saurus). They are generally similar in appearance, but if you had them side by side, you would know that they are different fish.
“Skipjack” as a nickname is used to refer to different fish in different places; in the salt I’ve heard the name used in reference to both ladyfish and some smallish sort of fish that looked like it was from the tuna family.
The skipjack herring Mike is talking about is a freshwater species. They are a true herring, in the family Clupeidae, which also includes sardines, menhadens, and the gizzard and threadfin shad so common in Tennessee. It should be noted that despite superficial similarity in appearance, tarpon are a more distant relative, in the family Megalopidae.
Mike, as far as I know, skipjack always spend their entire lives in fresh water and are not a landlocked anadromous species. There are two different shad species on the East Coast that look very similar – American Shad (Alosa sapidissima) and Hickory Shad (Alosa mediocris). Both of those fish are anadromous, meaning they live in the salt and migrate to fresh water to spawn. These are the “endangered” fish you are thinking of from up north; their populations have been severely impacted by dam building. They are definitely not the same as skipjack though – they are actually a popular food fish, whereas I’ve never heard of anyone eating a skipjack.
Zach, now you have received more information than you ever wanted to know about skipjack. And all this time, they said my Natural Resource Management degree would never be good for anything.
bd
I know you can fish egg patterns to rainbows sitting downstream from spawning browns, and that works pretty well.
bd
Mike, I wish I had seen that fish in person. Broken lines or not, it sure looks like a striper to me. Granted, you’ve caught a lot more hybrids than I have since you fish Priest, but look how streamlined that fish is, especially toward the tail. Every hybrid I’ve ever seen had a very broad mid-body that narrowed significantly around the area of the anal fin.
I dug up a few pics of big hybrids off the net for comparison. See how thick they are and how abruptly the body narrows from belly to tail?
Fishing Old Hickory over the years, I have seen many, many stripers with very broken lines – but they were definitely stripers. I don’t know if I believe the explanation from TWRA – since it only takes one sperm and one egg to produce fertilization, it seems like you should either have a striper/striper combo or a striper/white bass combo. Since the hybrids themselves are sterile, they couldn’t influence anything.
I suspect that somewhere along the line, TWRA got hold of a few brood fish that happened to have broken lines (genetic aberration or whatever), and we’re just seeing the thousands of offspring from those broken-lined fish as they cycle through the hatchery.
bd
His firm will make him bill an extra 1500 hours a year to pay for the added text on his business cards.
bd
