Originally Posted by J. E. Craig
Conundrum:

Spent about an hour fishing for BG with a goal of removing ALL 5-9" fish caught & all females greater than 5". I thought "This will be easy"
Caught 6 fish, all greater than 9". When I thought I had two females because of much lighter overall color & then checked the genital pore it was almost non-existent. You almost needed a magnifying glass to find it. I took it to be a male. The rest were clearly male.

https://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthre...13300&Words=boy+girl&Search=true

I did see red nasty looking lesions on a couple of the fish. I did not remove them but will in the future.

I suspect, I will have difficulty catching fish in that 5-9" slot. What is the best way forward? From what I see on my Deeper Sonar most all of my BG are in a range, at the very high end of the slot or above. These large BG will decimate the Apr-Oct spawn.

Remove all BG caught?

If your LMB are 75% RW, don't remove ANY bluegulls and remove a bunch of bass, I mean a bunch. Take out between 30 and 40 pounds of them per surface acre this year. Of all sizes, especially the ones that are under 100 RW.

The problem is your bass had enough food of the correct size to get to the length that they are now, but they ate all those fish and now they are losing weight. You need BG in there that are 1/3 the length of the LMB and the LMB are so hungry that they aren't letting the BG grow to that size. The LMB are eating them all when they are small, and because they have to expend just as much or more energy to catch the small fish they can't put on any weight.