Bait Profile - Rainbow Smelt
We are bringing back the bait profile series, since I never got to most of them anyway. This is a unique one and is something that people also spend a considerable amount of time fishing for in the winter. Not only do other fish like to eat them but we do too.
Like many of the other baitfish present the rainbow smelt is a small silvery fish. It lacks any dots or distinguishing markings but it does have one thing that sets it apart. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen or heard talk/posts about smelt or smelt like things. These are actually one of the easiest baitfish to identify. Just open their mouth and see if they’ve got big teeth! They also have a big mouth relative to their size. You’ll notice a slender profile and a deeply forked tail but the presence of teeth is a dead giveaway. They routinely prey on bugs and other fish although from what I’ve seen in the Great Lakes zooplankton makes a big chunk of their diet.
One thing to note about smelt is you won’t find them everywhere. They need some cool water to survive and are established in the Great Lakes and select lakes in upper peninsula/northern lower. They are native to the Atlantic coast and were introduced into Crystal Lake in northern Michigan in 1912. So technically they are an invasive fishery and have had both positive and negative effects on the fisheries they are found in. That introduction is how they found a way into the Great Lakes but I do not know how they ended up everywhere else.
My experience with smelt is pretty limited but they can get big (up to 12 inches) and they are pelagic. So fisheries with healthy smelt populations may have more fish foraging in open water vs fisheries that without them. That can make things challenging but maybe not so much anymore with the capabilities of forward facing sonar. Instead of structure their habitat is going to be mostly dictate by water temperature. Likely around the thermocline once lakes set up in the summer. They are spring spawners and do move into smaller creeks and rivers to spawn. So the outlets of those places can be likely spots for predators to set up and capitalize on the smelt run.
