It ain't easy being a yellow perch. Everything and everybody that likes to eat fish loves to chow down on the yellow perch.

That popularity has depressed yellow perch populations to alarmingly low levels throughout the reservoirs in the Helena area and even as far away from Montana as Lake Michigan, yellow perch populations are reported to have declined by as much as 80 percent since the early 1990s.

Yellow perch (Perca flavescens) are members of the Percidae family. Perca means dusky and although even the word flavescens seems to suggest perch taste good, flavescens literally translates to gold colored.

Yellow perch vary in color based on the water conditions of the region where they are found. The back of the yellow perch will range from a bright green or olive color to a golden brown. Yellow sides are found on virtually all perch and the belly can range in color from gray to milk white.

Yellow perch prefer cool water and are found naturally distributed in bodies of water classified as glacial lakes. Perch will school near shore in water at depths of up to 30 feet or more. They will feed most actively during the early morning and evening and then rest on the bottom during the night.

Yellow perch are bottom feeders and the adults have a slow and deliberate bite. They prefer minnows, worms, insect larvae and plankton on their menu, but there are few items a hungry perch won't consume.

Perch spawn takes place after ice out, usually in April, and usually immediately after the walleye spawn. Female perch lay ribbons of eggs that they attach to woody material such as the recycled Christmas trees that have been sunk in Canyon Ferry and Hauser reservoirs. Neither the female or male perch stick around after the spawn to guard or protect the eggs or the tiny perch that emerge from those eggs. That means that from the time they emerge from the mother in egg form, little perch are extremely vulnerable to predation.

Heavy predation is believed to be the cause of the seriously depressed yellow perch numbers in Canyon Ferry, Hauser and Holter reservoirs. Similar negative effects have been reported on yellow perch in Lake Michigan. Commercial fishing has been blamed in part for Wisconsin's perch woes but sport anglers have also had their daily limit of yellow perch reduced to five per day. Additionally, Lake Michigan has very high populations of salmon, trout and walleye, all of which love to gobble as many little perch as they can.

A study by an independent group of fisheries biologists working with perch in Lake Michigan suggested that heavy predation, a serious decline in the number of females in the population (20 percent of the perch captured were female) and poor recent spawns were to blame for the decline.