Do pike eat shad and alewives?
Where the map lets them. Shad are a southern and mid-continent forage fish, and the pike is a northern one, so across most of the pike's range the question never comes up. The overlap is regional: reservoirs and big rivers toward the southern edge of pike country hold gizzard shad, and Great Lakes bays and harbours see alewives — and in both places pike take them readily, because a soft-rayed, silvery, schooling fish is exactly the package a pike swallows most easily. What shad do not change is the address: these are still weed-edge and current-break ambushers, not open-water herders like bass. If your pike water has shad, a large silver-white bait fished along the usual edges is matching the hatch; everywhere else, stay with perch, cisco and sucker colours.
The full story
This answer is one piece of a longer lesson — setups, diagrams and the reasoning behind it.
More questions about Diet
- What do pike actually eat most?
- How big a prey can a pike really swallow?
- Do pike really eat ducklings and muskrats?
- Dead or alive — does a pike care?
- How does the pike menu shift through the year?
- What is the gorge-and-fast cycle, and how do I fish around it?
- Do pike ever eat insects, leeches and other invertebrates?
Same topic, other species
- Do crappie eat freshwater shrimp and scuds? — Crappie
- Do adult largemouth bother with leeches, worms, freshwater shrimp or fish eggs? — Largemouth Bass
- Do adult muskie ever eat small stuff — crayfish, gobies, insects, leeches? — Muskellunge (Muskie)
- What is simply too big for a perch — frogs, mice, suckers, ciscoes? — Yellow Perch
- Do smallmouth really eat leeches and hellgrammites? — Smallmouth Bass
- How does a trout's diet change as it grows? — Trout (Rainbow · Brook · Lake)
- Will walleye eat a dead minnow — and do they eat fish eggs or scuds? — Walleye