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As a rule of thumb, pike heavier than ten pounds tend to be exclusively female, male pike larger than twelve pounds are uncommon, but pike under eight pounds could be of either sex.
Female pike are capable of producing a large number of eggs. For example a twenty pounder could lay some 200,000 eggs. Females contain eggs at some stage of development for most of the year. Egg development begins during the summer months following the springtime spawn. During the following winter and spring the eggs mature and swell by absorbing water.
The spawning trigger depends on various factors including water temperature which is usually between 8 and 12 degrees celsius when spawning takes place. Male pike tend to arrive at the spawning ground before the females, selecting shallow areas of water where there ample submerged water plants or emergent vegetation - reed, rushes or even flooded areas of grass can be used.
There is some evidence of loyalty to particular spawning sites, mainly in rivers; pike use the same feeder ditches year after year. It may even be that small pike return in later life to the places where they were hatched.
Female pike may fail to shed their eggs when there are large temperature fluctuations during the spring. Unlike some other coarse fish they appear to be incapable or re-absorbing these eggs - which can constitute 20% of their body weight - and by early summer these fish often die.
Fertilised pike eggs hatch after 20-24 days but fry survival may be very low. For example, in one study of 1.25 million eggs produced 180 pike lived to one year of age, fifty lived to two years, 39 to 3 years, 20 to 4 years and only nine survived to five years of age.
Recruitment to the pike population is largely determined by survival of the younger stages in the life cycle, rather than the number of parents or the quantity of spawn which is shed. Predation and starvation are the prime causes of larval mortality.
The extent of pike on pike predation has particularly important consequences for the survival of pike during their juvenile stages. Figures of 79% of losses of young pike through cannibalism have been reported.
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