Why do some lakes fill up with stunted "hammer handle" pike?
It is a trap the species digs for itself when conditions misalign. Superb spawning habitat plus a thin prey base — no ciscoes or whitefish, sparse perch — produces huge year-classes with nothing big to eat, so thousands of pike stall at 40–55 cm (16–22 in), competing so hard that none can grow through the bottleneck. Removing big pike makes it worse, since adult cannibalism was the natural thinning mechanism. Escaping the trap requires the opposite of instinct: protect every large pike, harvest small ones aggressively where rules allow, and in some jurisdictions managers rebuild the prey base or restore the big-predator cap.
The full story
This answer is one piece of a longer lesson — setups, diagrams and the reasoning behind it.
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