These releases were not officially sanctioned and pose serious hybridisation risks to closely related species of terapontids endemic to the Lake Eyre system.

This population was established by NSW Fisheries translocations of juvenile fish from drying billabongs in the lower Murrumbidgee River in approximately 1915–17.

[3] Fishermen caught silver perch on unweighted baits such as worms and on small spinning-blade lures in rapids during migrations into upland rivers, as well as flowing and moving waters more generally.

The [fishing] rod is … used amongst the bream [silver perch] which run up to six pounds, and fight every inch of their way from the time they are struck till they are safely landed.

[3][4][5][7][15] A 1914 account describes a unique observation of silver perch spawning in the wild in the Murrumbidgee River: The observer of a shoal engaged in distributing ova says: “Between 50 and 70 silver perch were playing—some feeding at the surface and others swimming about apparently aimlessly—in a series of eddies under a precipitous bank of the Murrumbidgee River, at a spot where the water was 10 or 12 foot deep.

Suddenly, as though preconcerted, all the fish swam rapidly into a centre, splashing the water, in all directions, and becoming for an instant invisible owing to the agitation of the surface.

Soon after sundown the fish disappeared.” The eggs of the silver perch are demersal and adhere to submerged roots, rushes, &c., in the vicinity of the eddies described.

Longevity is a survival strategy in the often challenging Australian environment to ensure that most adults participate in at least one exceptional spawning and recruitment event, which are often linked to unusually wet La Niña years and may occur only every one or two decades.

[7][9] However, recent (2017) research unexpectedly found only a small proportion of silver perch in the surviving Murray River population older than seven years of age.

[7] More concerning is the possibility this represents a new impact that is not understood on an already imperilled species, creating a narrowed window of time for breeding and recruitment (recalling females only reach sexual maturity at 5 years of age).

For these reasons, the Australian federal government has listed wild silver perch as critically endangered under national environmental law.

[3] Silver perch are bred extensively in aquaculture but these domesticated strains and captive populations are of little use in ensuring the species' survival in the wild.

Such aquacultured silver perch are regularly stocked into numerous artificial impoundments where, without exception, they fail to establish self-sustaining populations.

This may be a factor in their recent serious declines; silver perch may rely on their eggs settling onto clean, well oxygenated substrates of coarse sediments.

[3][4] It may be that the section of the central Murray River that supports the last clearly viable natural population of silver perch primarily does so because it supplies a sufficiently long stretch of weir-free river, under standard regulated flows, for eggs to successfully complete their drift and hatch larvae into relatively natural, suitable riverine habitats for survival.

[20][3] In a positive development, since 2000, the installation of fishways in many Murray River weirs, so that native fish can pass through them and successfully migrate long distances again, and recent carefully managed environmental flow events, have seen silver perch numbers in the last remaining viable population increase strongly, and seen the population expand slightly in geographic range.