Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - How do you cull for large YP and Black crappie

Hey guys, its been a number of years since I have actively posted in here so I will do a little catch up. 3 acre pond with CC, CNB,Crappie,LMB, and now YP. When I first bought the place over 15 years ago I had a pond over run with little LMB. At the time my goal was to grow larger LMB so I began culling around 500 a year for several years. Things started looking good and I was catching less 10 inch LMB and more 15 plus inchers.I added black and white crappie about 10 years ago. I have culled them at about 100-200 a year average size is 10-11 inches.
The last four years have really been amazing as I was seeing all year classes and lots of them. My average bluegill I caught even got larger to around 8 inches. It seems adding the crappie somehow really benefited me even though most people say not to do that in a small pond. From spring to fall I now regularly see tons of schools of small fish in clouds in the water with many flying out of the water from larger fish chasing them. Average Channel cat is probably 4 pounds and there are plenty of them. Last October I added 300 6-9 inch YP. My goal has changed and I would like to know what I should do to grow Large YP and crappie. I caught a couple of the YP a month ago and they really look good and fat. I just want to know how to cull each species with my goal in mind. I am now in a place where I can focus more on the pond and plan to start a feeding program come spring.Thanks guys

With two other predators in the pond to eat small YP, keeping a viable perch population around without restocking is likely to be a bigger problem than having to remove any small YP.

You should probably see how the YP population does in the future to decide if you want more or less of them. Either way, I suggest placing some branches (big end out of the pond) in the water around the shore at the time of ice-out as spawning structure for the YP (they might be big enough this Spring, probably a surer thing next year). This will let you help increase YP number IF that turns out to be needed, but OTOH will let you remove the branches with YP egg strings if you want to decrease their numbers in the future.

I've no experience with Crappie ponds, so hopefully someone else can talk Crappy number control in greater detail than "if you have too many, fish a lot and remove all the small ones you can."

Heres some we caught just before winter.

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To me the larger bass look a bit stunted, so that is the size class that I would target on removing. Strive for 30# per surface acre.