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Not sure if has been asked before, but do we have any idea how old the female perch are that our fishermen take from the deep clay flat????

Not positive but I thought they had said around 5 yrs for the big ones.
I can't believe no perch reports from yesterday, thought it would have been a great day

Depends on the size and gender of the fish. Females generally grow faster, get larger and live longer. 

Perch growth has tremendously changed over the past few years. 10 years ago, most perch in that 10-14 inch size class would have been 8-12 years old. But growth suddenly accelerated, and now we are seeing 14 inch perch that are only 6-7 years old. The oldest perch we aged in 2024 was 8 years old. In the 2000s and 2010s, it was common to see perch in the 12 to 15 year old range. No longer.

One of the indexes we track is length at Age 2. For almost all of the 2000s and 2010s, a 2 year old female perch averaged about 5 to 5.5 inches. In the last several years, the average 2-year old female perch has jumped to about 8 inches. Hard to understate the magnitude of that change - it's almost unbelievable. 

Similarly, the "Age of 50% maturity" in which half or more of the females are sexually mature, has gone from about 6 years old, down to 2 or 3 years old. 

It's hard to say what exactly has spurred this huge growth spurt - but usually when you see something like this it is a function of "density-dependent growth" - ie when there are fewer fish, there is more food to go around and they can grow faster. However, it could also be that there has been an increase in food (more small gobies, shiners, alewife, etc) in recent years as well.



 

Interesting stuff, Ben. Is the same trend going on in other areas?  IL, southern Michigan, all over the lake?  How does this match up with growths in other "perchy places" like Sandusky Bay, Green Bay, Lake Erie?

For the guys fishing the deep clay flat,,,,,,, have you ever wondered if this area was the only one of its kind???

Wouldn't it be cool if we could find more??? Seems to be that there very well might be more spots around the lake and over toward Chicago that also have the deep clay areas that those big perch prefer to winter on.

Some day we might see a push to find out more information and possibly telemetry used to help. With our winters being as they are and ice being light, fishing pressure goes up on these areas. I recently heard of more reports of guys still thinking that they can throw small perch back thinking they swim off. We all know those fish will not make it. Could we in time manage to hold a Perch Summit applying Indiana/Illinois seagrant along with our Lake Michigan biologist??