Pond Boss Magazine: Black Crappie-White Crappie... What's the Difference?

When someone calls, asking about stocking crappie, they aren’t thinking about the business end of their trusty rod bent double with the fight of a lifetime-best sport fish.’’

They are thinking about a fillet knife, corn meal and hot peanut oil.

Crappie are schooling fish, usually fish of like size, which offers a fast pace, when the bite is on for those few weeks each year.

One of the biggest myths about crappie is which species is which. Recently, on our YouTube page @ThePondBoss, we uploaded a crappie video, which went viral (at least for our page) and one of the comments was about the different species and how they compare to the hybrids.

If you want to win a bet at the coffee shop with the old timers early one morning, ask them the difference between black and white crappie. One of the

most knowledgeable will soon chime in, probably giving you the “look” as he explains, “White crappie are white, light colored and black crappie have darker lines and spots.”

Not true.

Bring this article to win the bet…but they still won’t believe you.

White crappie aren’t always lighter colors, but they definitely are lighter than the black species. But white crappie can have dark lines and spots, primarily the males during spawn. Female black crappie can have lighter colors than black crappie males, so what gives with the color talk?

Here’s the hard truth. Speaking of hard, count the hard spines on the dorsal rays. If there’s seven or more, that’s a black crappie, no matter the color. If there’s less than seven, it’s a white.

Black crappie tend to reproduce at a lower rate than white crappie. Sounds good, until we understand the next layer of that proverbial biological onion. Both spawn way too much, or not zero in any given lake, based on environmental circumstances, primarily weather during the spring.

The hybrid cross between the two species should be like a mule, which can’t reproduce. Hybrid crappie can, and will, have little ones. But those babies can’t be the same as the parents, because they carry genes for both species.

Sound complicated? It kind of is. They begin to revert, even if not many of the offspring are truly viable.

The YouTube viewer mentioned crappie native to Missouri and Arkansas that has a black stripe from its dorsal fin all the way to the end of its nose. Those novel fish made their way into the pond management industry in the mid-1980’s.

Yes, biologists recommend stocking crappie, usually black crappie, into waters 20-acres or larger, due to how much they compete for food and space, especially eating insects and small fish and competing with bluegills, the backbone of a bass fishery.

The biggest rub with stocking these fish is their erratic spawning success and tendency to overcrowd. But you already knew that.

Since this article is to help you learn the differences and how to identify them, you can decide whether or not you’d like to stock some and see how it goes.