A few hours at the South marina today

[TubeDude]

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If you haven't already done so, you might send that pic to Chris Penne and ask for any additional input he might provide. 

Good idea, I'll send the pics to Chris. I think the only reason Ira noticed it was because the water level had dropped so much it exposed it and he thought there was another one just off shore because he was seeing some bubbles coming up from it. Maybe that's why wipers love mussels so much, because they are naturally in the lake.
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I was guessing that the mussel was probably exposed by the receding water level.  When I was a kid in Idaho I fished on a little creek that ran through Idaho Falls...Willow Creek.  It has since been diverted and dammed...and is now Ririe Reservoir.  But in those days whenever the creek level dropped very low in the late summer some of us kids would wade up and down the creek picking up those mussels. 

I seriously doubt that freshwater mussels are a significant part of the wiper diet.  I suspect that the attraction to mussels that make them such pushovers for the mussel-dunking crowd is a genetic instinctive thing inherited from their striped bass side of the family.  Salt water stripers eat lots of mollusks in their natural environments. 

But there is no accounting for tastes.  While on a temporary work assignment in the New Orleans area I was taken fishing for stripers...using chicken guts.  And the local stripers munched them like candy.  Can't figure out where and how they might have acquired a taste for catfish bait.