Reports

After my guided trip today with Jeff and Jake, Jeff sent me a photo of a fish that he found in his 25″ pike’s stomach after filleting it.  He thought perhaps it was a young carp, but I think after closer scrutiny, it’s more likely a Rudd.  This is the first actually confirmation I’ve had of pike eating Rudd here in the Finger Lakes.  We’ve had Rudd around for awhile – I’d say at least 15 years, but it didn’t appear as though fish were utilizing them for food.  Seneca Lake is full of Rudd.  I cleaned a couple pike a year out of that lake over the past decade and never saw a single rudd in a fish’s stomach.

Kevin Kapuscinski, a researcher specializing in muskies (he also likes to catch them – I had him out on my boat when he was a graduate student at Syracuse on Otisco Lake on October 19th, 2008, when he showed my friend Jarred and myself how to “figure-8” muskies.  He also showed us his homemade bucktail spinners) did a study on the Niagara River musky population and the invasive Rudd.  He did this research a long time ago, when Rudd were really just getting established in the river.  At that time, unbelievably, Rudd were the most common species in the Niagara River in terms of biomass, but the muskies were not eating them at all!  Rudd apparently got introduced into a lot of area waterways due to the bait trade.  Rudd look almost identical to golden shiners!   Seneca Lake is full of them as I mentioned before.  Perhaps it takes time for invasive species to be looked at by predators as food.  That was certainly the case with round goby in Cayuga Lake.  It took a couple years before they really showed up heavily in lake trout diets.

If pike really get into feeding on Rudd, Seneca Lake could really turn into an amazing pike fishery again.  There are metric TONS of rudd out there!  I reached out to Kevin and will try to follow up on this finding.