April 2024 • Nebraskaland 35
country (read sidebar page 35).
On the way home, we stopped by Walmart to pick up
a pack of Louisiana Fish Fry, frozen french fries and a
case of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I cooked our fi sh dinner on
the back deck that evening. It was nothing fancy — just
good Nebraska eating to end a productive spring day on
the water.
Flanagan took us all by surprise.
N
The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission manages the
fi shery at Flanagan Lake. The City of Omaha maintains the
lake's facilities. The Papio-Missouri River Natural Resource
District operates the reservoir.
Why Special Regs
at Flanagan?
The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission
began implementing a 10-inch maximum length
limit for crappie and 8-inch maximum length limit
for bluegill and redear sunfish at Flanagan Lake
on Jan. 1, 2023. These limits are not only unique
to Nebraska, but as far as we know, are unique
to the country. The ultimate goal is to create a
"trophy" fishery.
Crappie in southeastern Nebraska tend to hit a
growth bottleneck at around 8-10 inches, where
they stack up in that range with few pushing past
the bottleneck to larger sizes. Similarly, bluegill
tend to stack up in the 6- to 8-inch range, with few
growing larger than 8 inches.
The thinking behind the regulation is that by
reducing the density of the most abundant size
groups of crappie, bluegill and redear sunfish, we
can increase the amount of resources available
for the remaining fish in the water body to
hopefully increase growth rates. And by releasing
fish that are over the limit, we retain those larger
fish in the water body.
So, we set up an experiment to test this
hypothesis through regulation. We want to find
out if we could push those fish populations into
ones that have higher proportions of bigger fish.
The goal is for anglers to be able to regularly
catch 9- to 10-inch bluegill and 13- to 15-inch
crappie at Flanagan. We don't know if the
experiment will be successful, but we are
optimistic. We are just one year into a five-year
study, and we'll continue to monitor the fishery
and collect data to see how these regulations
impact the fishery.
By Jacob Werner, Fisheries Biologist
Fish survey of Flanagan Lake in March 2020.
JEFF KURRUS, NEBRASKALAND
