GREAT OUTDOORS: White perch hated here, revered elsewhere

According to Milton B. Trautman, Stone Laboratory's fish guru and the author of "The Fishes of Ohio," published in 1953 and revised in 1981, the first record of white perch being caught in Lake Erie was in 1953, then they were not seen again until 1973. In 1974 and 1975, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Wildlife gave considerable publicity urging commercial and sport anglers to watch for them, yet only a couple of dozen were authenticated.But since then it has been "Katy bar the door" as the white perch population has risen to consistently become the most numerous young-of-year predator species caught almost every year in Lake Erie fish trawl surveys. Ohio Sea Grant made it one of its early missions to help educate the angling public how to tell the difference between the invasive white perch and white bass, native to Lake Erie. Both species are members of the temperate bass family that also includes striped bass, a staple of the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific coasts, and yellow bass, found in slower-moving waters within the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Fisheries biologists are taught early on to not rely on color to identify fish. They can fade, brighten or take on the colors of their surroundings when trying to hide, stressed out or during spawning season. Yet one cheat code that is often reliable is a purple chin seen on white perch.Structural features that remain the same under all environmental situations on fish include body shape, types of fins and their shapes, location and numbers of spines and rays, lateral line scale counts and types and gill raker shape and counts.Specifically, to separate white bass from white perch using structural adult features, note these differences: Anal fin (on the bottom ahead of the tail): White bass have three (stiff and sharp) anal spines of increasing lengths from front to back, followed by 10-12 (soft and branched) rays vs. a white perch's three anal spines consisting of a shorter front one followed by two of about the same length, then 9-10 rays. (Hybrids occur frequently and have intermediate spine lengths and ray counts.)Dorsal (on the top): On white bass, the (front) spiny section is completely separated so that pulling forward on it does not cause the (rear) soft-rayed fin to rise. With white perch, pulling forward on the spiny dorsal fin causes the soft dorsal fin, which is connected to it by membrane, to also raise.In his classic tome New Standard Fishing Encyclopedia, A. J. McClane states, "There is no finer fish to eat than the white perch."I emphatically disagree. Maybe populations living in brackish waters along the Atlantic coast have a different diet that leads to better-tasting meat.But even when I catch them through the ice, when they should be at their culinary best, I have yet to be able to swallow a single bite of the musty-tasting fish prepared identically alongside yellow perch, walleye, white bass or channel catfish.Many anglers lament the white perch's bait-stealing prowess and the sharp spines that are also present on their gill flaps that lead to punctured thumbs while unhooking them.Some days, we fill a bucket with these nasty, aquatic nuisance species when they school under my ice shanty, while decimating my supply of precious emerald shiners. During open water fishing season, they steal minnows or worms intended for yellow perch or walleyes. Gulls get all of the white perch that I catch while I try to rid the lake of them.