We are having a pretty bad fish kill at the lake that I live on. 3-5lb bass floating around everywhere. All have some kind of fungus on them. Even saw some dead crappie and bluegill as I drove across the dam this morning.
It is getting so bad that the turkey vultures are coming in to scavenge.

It really makes me ill to see this. I'm calling Barry Newton, the district fisheries biologist out of Sparta, IL, today and see if he has any insight on what is causing it. I suspect it has something to do with all the heavy rains and the water coming into the lake. Anyone else out there seeing fish kills? I hope it don't get 'em all.

Joe

Joe we had one maybe 2-3 years back or so at our city lake which is marions drinking water.....they did something with the chemicals and it killed everything in the lake.....the turtles and all....
But you can already go down there and catch fish again....they just aren't monsters......
http://www.siloutdoors.com/showthread.php?t=479&highlight=marion

Joe my concern would be that some ag run off has occured and that perhaps there is now a toxic level of one of the ag chemicals in the water. Had anyone recently sprayed or applied any ag chemicals where the srpay could have easily drifted to the lake or perhaps been washed into the water foloowing a heavy rain?

I've seen that happen with ag chemical runoff more than once. And I've also seen it result in some ugly lawsuits between neighbors.

We do have alot of ag land upstream in our drainage to the lake. However, they are fertilizing now and we haven't had a steady inflow into the lake since those gulley washers we had back in March.

See, our lake has a "catch basin" design on the upper end. That means that the catch basin has to fill up with water before we have any inflow that actually goes into the lake from the upstream watershed. It takes a HUGE rain to accomplish this.

I've been doing some research and think the fish have a disease called Columnaris Disease. This is mentioned in my "Management of Small Lakes and Ponds in Illinois" book and I have researched it further. It happens in the spring on most lakes around the time of the spawn (right now) and the fish have the sores and the fungus that is associated with this bacterial infection.

The good news is that it usually only takes the weak or stressed fish and it likely won't take the entire population. I'm just guessing that is it the problem. I have a call in with Barry Newman, the district 13 fisheries biologist. He is supposed to return my call. I'm hoping he will come investigate and tell me for sure.

Joe

It sounds terrible for me to say I'm glad your fish have a disease..and that's not really what I mean..I'm just glad that it doesn't appear to be an ag chemical kill off.

Crab Orchard had a BIG fish skill about 10 years ago. I remeber driving to John A Logan to go to school and you'd smell dead fish for about 2-3 weeks. Never did hear what that was caused from.