On the Great Lakes, using goby-imitating baits for smallmouth bass is now as standard as tossing crawfish patterns on other lakes. A few years ago on Lake Michigan, I started catching brown trout mixed in with smallmouths on goby presentations. At first it was just one trout here and there. But when I started catching more browns than smallmouths, I knew it was no accident. These big football browns also were getting fat and sassy on their goby diet.
The round goby is the latest foreign fish to invade the Great Lakes. It now has spread to all the Great Lakes since its first sighting in the St. Clair River in 1990. In the past seven or eight years, this ballast-water transplant from the Black and Caspian seas of Eastern Europe has been connected to numerous ecosystem imbalances.
A thread of silver lining in this black cloud has been the development of the goby-smallmouth connection. In rocky and other hard-bottom areas, these 2- to 4-inch, blunt-headed, bug-eyed beauties pepper the bottom in large numbers. Gobies weren’t shy about moving into smallmouth habitat and smallmouths weren’t shy about feeding on this easy and plentiful target. It didn’t take long for lure manufacturers to take notice; numerous goby-patterned crankbaits, jigs, and softbaits have taken the market by storm.
In 2004 and 2005, the overall size and weight of Lake Michigan’s chinook and coho salmon were down. The reason was speculated to be a temporary reduction in the alewife population. Meanwhile in those years, the browns flourished, getting heavier and heavier.
Not only were brown trout adapting to the new forage, they were thriving. In the spring of 2007, Wisconsin DNR biologists analyzed the stomach contents of brown trout. They found gobies. Loads of gobies. Stomachs packed with gobies.
For the past several years, I’ve focused my presentations on a goby forage pattern and I’ve connected with more and bigger browns. Many times I have found success when traditional Great Lakes tactics weren’t getting even a sniff. The nearshore goby-trout pattern starts around mid-April and gets stronger as the water warms. It holds together through part of fall but as October rolls around, nearshore browns are primarily spawners and they aren’t interested in feeding.
Goby Behavior
Although I’ve studied many articles about the habits of gobies in the Great Lakes, my most valuable findings have been personal observations. I’ve learned a few lessons by watching their behavior with an Aqua-Vu underwater camera.
Gobies love rocks, any rocks, from marble-size pebbles to refrigerator-sized boulders. I rarely see them on clean sandy or silty bottoms. They also favor zebra mussel colonies, both for cover and for food. They hang tight to cover—rarely do they roam open-water areas with no bottom cover. But get near cover such as rocks, a seawall, or a breakwall, and the bottom becomes carpeted with gobies.
Gobies never seem to leave the bottom. I haven’t seen one venture more than 18 inches off bottom. They don’t have a swim bladder so they essentially sink without fin propulsion. As fry or fingerlings, they’ve been observed to travel to the surface at night (perhaps in currents, probably how they get into ballast water), but for the rest of their life they appear to be bottom-dwellers.
