Does the walleye's menu change between day and night?

The menu is similar; the hunting economics flip. By day, prey species are alert and schooled tight, and a light-shy walleye mostly picks off stragglers deep or waits. At dusk the schools of perch and shiners lose visual contact, settle toward bottom or scatter shallow — perch essentially bed down for the night — and the walleye's tapetum turns dim water into a hunting ground full of half-blind, poorly organized targets. Night specialists add one more layer: in clear lakes, big walleye push remarkably shallow after dark to run down minnows against the surface and shoreline rocks. That is why night presentations run shallower and straighter than day ones — a slow minnowbait swimming a predictable line 1 m (3.3 ft) down imitates exactly the disoriented straggler the fish is out there to find.

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