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Posts: 1636
| I believe that large Muskies in most older systems are scavengers and primarily feed on larger, weak links in the food chain throughout the majority of the season.
In some ponds, the largest Largemouth Bass in the system can be easily caught on large, struggling Bluegills. Those same type of fish that feed primarily on Bluegill can be caught on hot dogs.
Pike are known to hit on dead bait and Tiger Muskies have been caught on hot dogs.
What do you think? |
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Posts: 32914
Location: Rhinelander, Wisconsin | Winter before last we ran out of bait icefishing Devils Lake, and caught the last couple tip-up big pike for our limit on honey ham venison sticks. |
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Posts: 1660
Location: central Wisconsin | A scavenger feeds on the dead. I don't ever recall catching one on a dead sucker. They feed on the dying you bet, that is what a great many of our baits imitate. |
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Posts: 1636
| Scavengers may also eat live prey. By definition, any instance of a Muskie feeding on something dead that is not being moved to imitate something live could be considered scavenging. |
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Posts: 1660
Location: central Wisconsin | OK |
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Location: Rhinelander, Wisconsin | I had a muskie or 2 in a giant aquarium over the years and found they didn't like to eat dying minnows. They would swim right by them and smoke one much harder to catch. I always wonder if that was instinctive avoidance of 'unhealthy' prey. These were in an aquarium, so all bets are off. |
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| Muskies are most certainly NOT scavengers! We as fishermen try to present them with an opportunity at an easy meal; of which any predator will take advantage. But simply because they take advantage of opportunity does not mean they target the sick or weak or dying! They also take advantage of location, current, cover ect to eat perfectly healthy strong prey! They target healthy sucker runs, cisco spawn, sunnies on beds and so on. If you observe them long enough from the fisherman's perspective you will clearly see they often do not eat the weak or dying! I don't sucker fish much, but some of the guys on can tell you how much more effective a healthy sucker that runs away is than a lifeless one. Also consider extremely fast moving presentations like bucktail burning and triggering strikes with a good, fast figure 8. Muskies practically never eat dead bait and we use cliches like: "If it moves, it's food." They are definitely predators and will regularly target the largest, fastest and most health prey! |
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| I should have said in most of the waters that I fish regularly... |
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Posts: 1636
| ...and I did not mean all specimens. I was referring to some individuals in-particular... based on some of my personal catches after a long time observing things from a fisherman's perspective on the water.  |
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Location: Rhinelander, Wisconsin | Reelwise,
Do you feel hybrids are more prone to scavenging? Pike sure do. |
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| Natural feeding activity and behavior is a little different than artificial presentations with fake lures - in my opinion. |
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| Steve, I do not have much experience with Pike. |
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| I get it...predators may occasionally scavenge!?! |
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Posts: 1636
| I believe it happens fairly often on some bodies of water when it comes to larger fish... I mainly fish reservoirs from just over 50 acres in size to almost a million. |
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Posts: 19
| I definitely believe that muskies are the apex predator of fresh water. A scavenger certainly would not T Bone a Headlock at 5 mph or chase down a Bulging double 10. However, I know some guys that do incredibly well in late fall and early winter on large dead shad near the bottom. In early December one guy caught a 51" on a dead shad. Any way I guess just like coyotes a predator may take a free meal sometimes if their hungry. |
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Posts: 1636
| Great White Sharks will chase down Seals and feed off dead carcasses of Whales. I have not personally witnessed any of this, but I have seen it on the Discovery channel.
Edited by Reelwise 1/13/2016 11:38 PM
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Location: oswego, il | Fish adapt to their environments. It could be that fish have the opportunity to scavenge where he fishes. Down here in the shad belt, a hard winter will cause shad to slowly die over the prespawn period. Steve Pallo told me there is no food for them, they digest their insides and die. Prespawn muskies can be tough after a hard winter. You can pick an upright shad with your hand. Fish don't have to chase these meals.
On heidecke lake I catch quite a few carp on crankbaits when the shad bloom happens. I catch many in the mouth, and alot in the body. They adapted to eating the shad. I believe that what they don't chase down, they body slam then eat. Thos also bolstered by the fact i see alot of stunned shad in areas where i see carp.I body hook them well off shore and my presentation is not all that fast.
Pike will eat dead minnows in the middle of summer. Next time your in Canada and somebody has a few toss them off the dock. Wont take long.
Edited by ToddM 1/14/2016 5:35 AM
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| I once thought that dead suckers wouldn't work for muskies....then I was proven wrong. For the water that I fish..... |
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Location: Alex or Alek? | I know someone here in ND that all they use for winter tip up fishing is hot dogs..and they catch a lot.
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Location: Hayward, Wisconsin | Pike are well known to take dead bait...muskies not so much, unless it is moving, i.e. like a sucker on a rig and the boat is moving, therefore moving the sucker. The old timers cast dead suckers with great success and worked them like a jerk bait.
My aquarium experience is like that of sworralls. When I would bring minnows home and a few were dead, I would take them by the tail and swish them on the surface before putting in the live ones...and WHAM! Got to watch the fingers though! LOL |
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Location: Aurora | Castalot - 1/13/2016 10:27 PM
A scavenger certainly would not T Bone a Headlock at 5 mph or chase down a Bulging double 10.
Not sure if they fall in the scavenger catagory but I've had several dogfish and a few big bullheads chase down fast moving big buck tails over the years and eat them and/or try to eat them.
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Posts: 1636
| I'm not trying to classify the Muskie as a scavenger. I just believe some of the largest fish in a lot of bodies of water scavenge and prey on the weak links in the system quite often. Mainly in fisheries where gigantic schools of shad are not present. More-so in smaller bodies of water where the main species of fish are Bluegills, Bass, and Walleye. |
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Posts: 3155
| So what do I do with the grizzly staring at me?????
Grizzlys scavenge elk and deer carcasses,,
But yet we're told to.play dead
I shave my head and with the wrinkles on it I look like a hot dog end
Run or act ??????? |
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Posts: 8816
| happy hooker - 1/14/2016 10:35 AM
So what do I do with the grizzly staring at me?????
Grizzlys scavenge elk and deer carcasses,,
But yet we're told to.play dead
I shave my head and with the wrinkles on it I look like a hot dog end
Run or act ???????
I believe they tell you not to run because you're sure to get killed if you do. You might still get killed if you don't, but playing dead sometimes causes them to lose interest after a few bites when they figure out that people taste bad. I think.
Going back to muskies... It wouldn't surprise me if they do scavenge some. They pretty much eat what they can catch. But I've seen them sit and stare at a sucker for minutes on end until it finally wakes up and realizes its in a whole lot of trouble. As soon as they start to flee, they get eaten. We've also had days like that where they'd just sit there until you dropped down a new lively sucker. They had every chance to eat the ones we had rigged up before, but the fresh one never even made it to the bottom. |
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Location: Contrarian Island | praying on a weak link and scavenging are 2 very different things....scavenging by definition is feeding on dead animals...while I do think they might do some of that, adult large muskies prefer things that are alive if available.. which pretty much every lake will have....praying on a weak link is similiar to the lion that sits and watches a herd of wildebeests run by, he waits, and waits and then see's the one that maybe older or injured and leaps out.. no different than a musky..they are opportunistic feeders when they see something they think is injured like when little jonny is reeling in a crappie, they pounce...to them it's an easy target...scavenger, no.... opportunistic feeder, yes.
Edited by BNelson 1/14/2016 11:01 AM
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Location: Grand Rapids, MI | I used to believe what the magazines told be about weak and dying fish and that our lure look like injured fish. Fortunately 20 some years ago I realize I needed to start thinking for myself and learn from my own observation. Now I don't believe that's how freshwater apex predators do most of their feeding and in fact I don't believe that's how most piscivores feed. Will they do things that aren't "normal behavior"? Sure.
We also need to be careful comparing muskies to other more evolved fish and we certainly can't compare them to mammals that have the ability to think and learn. My opinion is that freshwater predators evolved to avoid the weak and diseased. If they didn't they themselves would have contracted any passable disease and therefore be eliminated. This is also (my opinion) why we see more selective feeding from fish that are higher on the food chain. |
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Location: Contrarian Island | so you are saying muskies can't think or learn?
while I do agree muskies are going to prefer 'healthy' forage, they obviously hit lures that are not acting healthy...look at a slow moving weagle... what is that suppose to be? def not a healthy fish on the surface...
Edited by BNelson 1/14/2016 11:50 AM
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Location: Rhinelander, Wisconsin | Define 'learn'.
Fish don't 'learn' as humans understand the function, but will, through repeated successes and failures over generations, change behavior. The main problem is they lack the brain structure to 'reason'.
Be careful of anthropomorphism.
Short term, fish can become less 'interested' in a lure because of repeated exposure, which reduces the response the footprint of the lure is creating. The more of that footprint in the environment, the less, eventually, the response. Some studies on Bass show repeated captures reduce response to a single presentation...but change a tiny bit of it, and boom. So they don't 'learn' not to hit a spinnerbait, for example.
A Weagle doesn't behave, look, sound like, act like , sorta resemble, or anything else a living thing; record one. The out of the box stimulus creates a response that is automatic. To way over-simplify, sort of Doug's 'if it moves it's food' response. I know for sure the first time muskies are exposed to that lure, they respond differently than the one hundred thousandth time. Why? Stimulus/response.
Eating 'sick' prey is something most predators avoid IF they are not literally starving, not because the particular predator looks at prey and 'thinks' "Oh, not that one, it's sick", it's more of an instinctive measure developed by 10,000 + years of evolving. I've watched Pike on camera on dead bait, and if the odor is 'off', they will not take it.
The Waterwolf video we shot this year on Eagle of muskies shadowing our sucker was pretty interesting too. The muskies would charge up on the sucker, and if it didn't respond, back off. If the sucker tried to 'get away', the response was stronger. It took a pretty big move that day to get a strike, and we only had one, despite some impressive Eagle Lake blondies staying with the sucker for over a half hour. |
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Location: Grand Rapids, MI | BNelson - 1/14/2016 12:49 PM so you are saying muskies can't think or learn? while I do agree muskies are going to prefer 'healthy' forage, they obviously hit lures that are not acting healthy...look at a slow moving weagle... what is that suppose to be? def not a healthy fish on the surface... Disagree. Have you ever watched a fish on the surface eating mayflys or other bugs? It's almost the identical motion to a death marched Weagle.
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Posts: 93
Location: Des Moines IA | I believe I read a article in In-Fisherman or Fishing Facts some 35 years ago about muskies eating dead cisco and tullibee off the bottom of deep water lakes such as Walker Bay on Leech Lake. Also mentioned that muskies would hang below the schools and wait for the weaker ones to fall for a easy meal. |
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