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.
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.
Scott emailed me...here are my thoughts. Cull bass...they started the "problem". Weigh and measure all bass caught. If they are under 90 relative weight, remove those fish. If they are 95 or bigger, release them. Those between 90-95, judge the fish on its own merit. How many, you might ask? All of them under 14" for sure. If your biggest bluegills are at least six years old, cull some of them...they are at the end of their lifespan. Don't take the best, fattest ones...take underweight fish to make room for other bluegills to grow up into the slot. Cull bluegills to improve the food chain. If trophy bluegills are a significant goal, only take the underperformers of the larger ones. Increase the lake's productivity by feeding the fish a good, fish-meal-based fish food, and consider fertilization, depending on water clarity.
The dynamics of the population need to be shifted, starting by removing bass...get the mouths off the feed trough. As you do that, alter the bluegills to stimulate a series of spawns. If your adult bluegill numbers seem low due to attrition, consider stocking some younger adult fish, 4-7" long. Feed them and they'll perform.
Last piece of advice...make sure you have enough areas for bluegills to spawn. That's a universal problem I see around most of the south and southeast.
Bob - love a thread I started many many years ago! I posted that one right after you and your better half left our ranch and pond - so after reading all of the awesome post here my plan is to not cull my BG - rather I am going to cull around 50 of my bass between 8 inches and 14 inches. Caught this guy today so I think overall things are going well - he went 7.5 lbs
Scott emailed me...here are my thoughts. Cull bass...they started the "problem". Weigh and measure all bass caught. If they are under 90 relative weight, remove those fish. If they are 95 or bigger, release them. Those between 90-95, judge the fish on its own merit. How many, you might ask? All of them under 14" for sure. If your biggest bluegills are at least six years old, cull some of them...they are at the end of their lifespan. Don't take the best, fattest ones...take underweight fish to make room for other bluegills to grow up into the slot. Cull bluegills to improve the food chain. If trophy bluegills are a significant goal, only take the underperformers of the larger ones. Increase the lake's productivity by feeding the fish a good, fish-meal-based fish food, and consider fertilization, depending on water clarity.
The dynamics of the population need to be shifted, starting by removing bass...get the mouths off the feed trough. As you do that, alter the bluegills to stimulate a series of spawns. If your adult bluegill numbers seem low due to attrition, consider stocking some younger adult fish, 4-7" long. Feed them and they'll perform.
Last piece of advice...make sure you have enough areas for bluegills to spawn. That's a universal problem I see around most of the south and southeast.
