Survival of Fingerling Black Crappies Tagged with Microwire Tags Stocked in a Florida Lake

Abstract We evaluated 24-h poststocking survival of fingerling black crappies Pomoxis nigromaculatus (mean total length 117 mm) that were cheek-tagged with binary-coded microwire (CW) tags and estimated the percent contribution of stocked fish to a naturally occurring year-class in a Florida lake. Retention of CW tags at 15 d was high (96%), but posttagging survival of CW-tagged fish was low compared with reports for other CW-tagged species and for untagged fingerling black crappies. Survival at 24-h averaged 26% (SD = 11) for CW-tagged fish held in a cage in Lake Jeffords, Florida. Ten months after stocking 294 fingerling black crappies/ha in Lake Jeffords, only 4.8% of the age-1 fish sampled from the lake with otter trawls had CW tags. Low posttagging survival probably contributed to the low percent contribution of stocked fish to the naturally occurring year-class.