My pond is in east Texas,so I did what any red blooded LMB fanatic would do: Stocked the very best, superior LMB. Lone Star Legacy Floridas!

Visions of 8 lb bass in three years danced in my head as I carefully stocked RES, CNBG, TP, GSH, FHM etc as forage. Heck, I even got 4 feeders going to make sure the bass had plenty of CNBG to eat.

But the reality was quite different: 90 percent of them remained small per last fall's electro survey. Pond was too infertile, not enough brush, etc, etc. Whatever the reasons, the genetically superior strain was simply not working.

So last fall I had one hundred 1.5 to 2.0 lb feed trained northern LMB stocked. The idea was to bypass the biological bottleneck for small bass so they could dine are more abundant larger prey fish.

Results? Spectacular: I now see, & my friends & family have caught, numerous 2 to 3 lb bass. Some of them take the feed, some don't, but they appear quite fat. And aggressive!

Question: Are we so enamored of the idea of 10 lb plus bass that we overlook the positives of bass that top out around 7 or 8 lb?

anthropic...I am totally on board with your thoughts. I started stocking Northern Black Bass a couple of years ago when I read in several publications that in studies they have been proven to be less hook shy. Of course it's all about the pond owner's goals....but I prefer myself and my guests to catch a lot of decent fish vs the rare home-run mega bass.

Zep, I remember Bob Lusk sharing a story about observing Fla LMB feeding at a hatchery. Prey fish were dropped in the Fla tank, and the bass just turned slightly to watch them. All the prey would be eaten eventually, of course, but only after careful observation. No rush at all.

Think what that means when we try to fool a big Fla LMB with an artificial lure!

Bob then watched as the prey fish were dropped into a tank with Northern LMB. They didn't last a minute.

I've had the conversation with my wife about fish determining if something is food or not.

I told her, imagine if a turd and a hot dog were laying on the side walk. Few humans would have trouble distinguishing the difference even without stooping down, picking it up and tasting it. My question to her is "would fish in their own element be any less discerning?"

It seems to me fish may strike lures for several different reasons, but because it looks like food may be less than we think. I throw pellets out among BG and they are hogging them up. Throw a lure out among a hundred fish feeding on pellets and most of them ignore it and eat pellets instead. But I will eventually catch one. Maybe a really dumb one???

Musings of someone who is not a very good angler. Pay no attention.

Frank, I am happy for you. It sounds like everything is going your way. From all your posts on your pond, and my personal pond experiences in comparison, we have both gone through some learning curve's. Ponds can be "So Different" even when they are not all that far apart.

For others here, Frank and I Just split an order of Optimal fish food of different sizes. Thanks for your help with the order Frank.

There is a lot here on "catchability" wrt Fla , F-1 and northern LMB. One simple point is that Fla LMB males stay small while the females get big. So half your LMB will be small if Fla are stocked.

It depends on goals , catchability and genetics. Keep in mind that catchability can be a problem with Northern LMB as well.

This thread caught the attention of Bill Cody, who suggested it become a topic of a Pond Boss magazine story.

Read about it in the May-June issue of the magazine.

My northern bass on feed are doing really well. I hope we will be able to tell the difference in feed trained northerns and the Tiger bass we stocked when Bob and crew does the shock survey this fall.

I caught a few fish recently in my existing pond that were apparently there before I stocked. I am assuming they are Northern LMB that randomly got there somehow. If these fish are "inferior" then I am ok with having inferior fish in my pond. Both were fun to catch and look extremely healthy.

I'm sure that as they get bigger & wiser, even northern LMB will become a lot more challenging to catch.

That said, I had an excellent opportunity to observe comparative feeding behavior off my dock. The 12 inch fish were northern, 5 to 7 inchers Floridas.

I was trying to catch out the runts, but couldn't keep the larger fish off my small jigworm. Very annoying, as I had to carefully unhook the big guys and gently return them to the water. First time in my life that the big fish wouldn't allow little fish to take the bait...

These were northern LMB

Wow, that's impressive! Hope my pond will be equally productive in a few years.

Fantastic fish! I hope my pond will be productive like this in a few years.

Such a quandry: How do we get rid of the less catchable fish when we can't catch them???

I do not fully understand the the ewest chart. How are high and low vulnerability defined from the same population? What criteria were used to define vulnerability? Does it have anything to do with variability of innate intelligence, instinct, conditioning, or previous exposure to angling?

Two ways to help to are tagging caught fish then remove non tagged fish by electroshock or seine/trap.

Here you go Bill. Do you want the study?

Philipp et al. (2009) demonstrated that vulnerability to recreational angling is a heritable trait (heritability h2 = 0.15) by conducting multi-generation artificial selection on Largemouth Bass based on the number of times individuals were captured by experimental angling. Further studies on the lines developed by Philipp et al. (2009) revealed that selection from recreational angling acts on a suite of behavioral (Cooke et al. 2007; Nannini et al. 2011; Sutter et al. 2012), physiological (Cooke et al. 2007; Redpath et al. 2010), and reproductive (Cooke et al. 2007; Sutter et al. 2012) traits. Individuals that were bred for high angling vulnerability had higher metabolic rates (Redpath et al. 2010) and higher reproductive success (Sutter et al. 2012).

http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.ph...true#Post475742

http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.ph...true#Post159224

Good idea. Multiple tags mean especially catchable fish that, so long as they have good RW, should be returned.

Or should they? What if a few of the most catchable bass were put into a small forage pond, fed with BG? Would their offspring be worth placing back in the main lake?

That is an idea. It involves some minor risk as to moving the fish from one water to another. If properly nourished (either pond) then you want your best fish reproducing. However a warning - "best fish" is not always easy to tell. I would not want an over abundance of any single genetics in a pond (thousands of one source fish over several years). Bruce Condello did lots of excellent work using that concept on BG. Outstanding results. I think he would tell you that you never really know what "best" is. If you guess wrong and multiply that over and over by 1000 fish a year you have a problem. There is a lot positive to say about a very diverse group of "best fish".

Thanks ewest for clarification and references. For those interested here is the basics of the Philipp 20 catchability study.

The study began in 1975 with the resident population of bass in Ridge Lake, an experimental study lake in Fox Ridge State Park in Charleston. The fishing was controlled. For example, anglers had to reserve times, and every fish that was caught was put into a live well on the boat. The fish were measured and tagged to keep track of how many times each fish had been caught. All fish were then released. (Cody Note - the fish could be fin clipped marked instead of tagged.)

"We kept track over four years of all of the angling that went on, and we have a total record – there were thousands of captures," said David Philipp, ecology and conservation researcher at U of I. "Many fish were caught more than once. One fish was caught three times in the first two days, and another was caught 16 times in one year."
After four years, the pond was drained, and more than 1,700 fish were collected. "Interestingly, about 200 of those fish had never been caught, even though they had been in the lake the entire four years," Philipp said.
Males and females from the group that had never been caught were designated Low Vulnerability (LV) parents. To produce a line of LV offspring, these parents were allowed to spawn with each other in university research ponds. Similarly, males and females that had been caught four or more times in the study were designated High Vulnerability (HV) parents that were spawned in different ponds to produce a line of HV offspring. The two lines were then marked and raised in common ponds until they were big enough to be fished.
"Controlled fishing experiments clearly showed that the HV offspring were more vulnerable to angling than the LV offspring," said Philipp.
This selection process was repeated for several generations over the course of the 20 year experiment.
"As we had predicted, vulnerability was a heritable trait," he said. Philipp went on to explain that with each generation, the difference between lines in angling vulnerability grew even larger.
"Most of the selection is occurring on the LV fish – that is, for the most part, the process is making that line of fish less vulnerable to angling. We actually saw only a small increase in angling vulnerability in the HV line,"
This selection process was repeated for several generations over the course of the 20 year experiment. "As we had predicted, vulnerability was a heritable trait,"

That is interesting. I wonder how that vulnerability related to fish growth? If the fish was far more picky about what it stuck in its mouth, would that equate to slower growth compared to a fish that would eat anything?

right, I wonder what the average rw's were for the hv and lv fish, if they were close, if the hv were larger due to their more aggressive traits

I want my whole pond stocked with the off-spring of the fish caught 16 times in one year!

Certainly that makes sense, but maybe only within a species/sub-species. After all, hv Northern LMB don't get as large as lv Fla LMB

Male northern LMB get bigger than Fla males. The Fla females are the big fish - larger than northern LMB females.

Here are some of the answers.

Further studies on the lines developed by Philipp et al. (2009) revealed that selection from recreational angling acts on a suite of behavioral (Cooke et al. 2007; Nannini et al. 2011; Sutter et al. 2012), physiological (Cooke et al. 2007; Redpath et al. 2010), and reproductive (Cooke et al. 2007; Sutter et al. 2012) traits. Individuals that were bred for high angling vulnerability had higher metabolic rates (Redpath et al. 2010) and higher reproductive success(Sutter et al. 2012). In the behavioral class are aggressiveness and more.

Not wanting to hijack here but I think this thread might be a good place to tell what I see in my pond when it comes to catching lmb. In my pond there is a good forage base of cnbg with some Res also. The lmb in my pond are hard to catch using artificial baits. These are Florida strain lmb from two different places but from the same fish supplier. Some were added as fingerlings and then the next two years they were added as yoy lmb. The fish are not or should not be hook shy because we have not caught and released enough to cause them to become hook shy. So, I am now entertaining the idea of adding northern genes to the pond. My original goal was for trophy lmb and that is still in the plans with three generations of Florida's in the pond. But, I also want a place where someone can catch a lmb when they go fishing at my place. I think dense populations of cnbg have also contributed to the lmb being harder to catch.

That might hold true with Northern LMB as well.

Studies show that many of the trophy LMB are Northern Fal. mixes and they do not exhibit the same degree of non-catchability.

And this is why I am introducing the feed trained Northern lmb to the pond. Placed an order with Todd Overton day before yesterday.

Shorty, I have to agree with you, but at some point, I would think the lmb will catch up and reduce the cnbg numbers. A couple of years ago I learned that feeding cnbg will cause them to grow faster to where the lmb can not eat them due to their size. And then they multiply

Tracy, I've been very pleased so far with the feed trained Northern LMB. Stocked 100 last fall, averaged around 12 inches. Every one I've caught has been fat, relative weight over 100.

Yesterday we caught a 17 - 18 incher, though not entirely sure that wasn't a LSL bass from the June 2016 stocking.