Bill Cody, Thanks for the info about the pond I'm working on. You were right about the gills following those zooplankton regardless of depth. We are catching them just an inch or two below the ice in abundance.
From your experience and best guess (given the limited amount of data currently available), do you think balance can be restored or is draining and starting over usually the better path to take.
NE Chad - Presence of zooplankton and fish within a few feet of the ice can also be due to lack of oxygen in the deeper waters which will force practically all oxygen consuming, mobile organisms toward the surface. Main good way to see if DO is okay near bottom is to catch a fish there. Presence of feeding fish near bottom indicates DO is adequate at that depth.
I normally do not work on ponds as big as 5 ac. But if your problem is mainly too many small BG and too few bass then the problem should be comparatively "easy to fix". Desired speed of restoration and BUDGET will be factors in how to proceed. Relatively easy to fix assumes 1. there are not a lot of carp or bullheads, and 2. Crappies are not common or abundant. Those two problems make restoration much more difficult in comparison to a problem of just too many small BG.
IF the main problem is too many small BG do not try to fix the problem by just stocking fingerling bass - this will give very poor if any success. In this case one should remove lots of small BG and also stock bass that are roughly 3 times longer than the average size of small BG that are being removed. Depending on when in the year the lots of small BG are removed then sometimes one can also add fingerling bass with the larger bass. Explanations will come when the work gets started or I think the specific how to advice is located on the PB forum.
Those fish you are catching just below the ice are they true BG hybrids, green sunfish or a mixture ?.
I will look to see if I can find some info about fish sampling on the forum. If I get anything I will post it on your forum thread.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 02/11/08 08:10 PM.
