Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Pond Boss Need some help from a pond mangement MASTER!

I have a few questions about a 15 year old pond and how to mange the bluegill and bass together.

Some info about the pond. It is a 3 acre pond. It has 3 aerator's. It is 15 years old, it was stock with bass for the first 10 years and was stocked with bluegill the first 5 years. It has not been stock with anything in 5 years.

Now my questions. I believe that I have to many bluegill in the pond you cant cast anywhere without getting a nibble from a bluegill. The bluegill really are not trophies at all. The largest one I have caught is 8inch. So what I was thinking of doing is taking all of the bluegill from 2" to 8" and taking them out of the pond. I want the pond to be a trophy bluegill lake and bass lake. What would this do to the bass popluation and growth?

The bass in the lake seem to be doing good as far as heathlyness. I have notice there are fewer bass every year but they seem to be getting fat er every year. But I do know that they are reproducing because I will catch a small young bass every so often. So what would happen if I do the bluegill thing like I said up in the other paragraph?

All of the help will be great. I dont know if this is just the cycle of the lake or if the bluegill are eating to much of the forage.

Thanks, the help will be great!!!

ZM: (Consider the following until a Master comes along. I haven't snatched any pebbles yet, but I'm still trying.)

I believe you have described one end of the common BG-LMB spectrum: overpopulated, stunted BG and few, large LMB. There are too many BG for most of them to get enough to eat. They probably are skinny (poor relative weight) and I bet they have large eyes for their body size.

Bass recruitment is limited by the huge hordes of small hungry BG eating bass eggs and fry. The few bass that manage to make it past fingerling size to adulthood have a large number of BG to eat, hence they have very good body condition. Your pond is likely at or near "Trophy Bass" status. Many PMs here would be happy to have that pond as their very own; by making minor adjustments (at most) it would be their dream lake.

If BG numbers were reduced, by angling, as you have proposed, or (perhaps) by the introduction of predators with middlin' sized mouths who are efficient at eating small BG, average BG condition and size should improve. There would be more BG food available, on average, for fewer BG. The opposite affect on the bass would tend to happen - since they would have fewer small, eatin' sized BG available, they would not be in as good a condition as they are now. There would, however, be more of them, as fewer small BG would mean bass recruitment would improve.

It is very, very hard to have BOTH trophy BG and trophy LMB in the same pond, and when this condition exists, it tends to be unstable and the average body condition of one or both species will likely decline soon. So you need to decide which kind of trophy fish is most important to you. If that is the bass, you would not want to remove many BG, but rather consider the minor, "higher tech" tweaking which would help improve bass quality (such as improving LMB genetics or stocking an additional forage species like Threadfin Shad - if you were far enough South for them to overwinter). Buy Bob Lusk's "Raising Trophy Bass" book; read and follow it.

If you want trophy BG most of all, congratulations, you are in Nebraska, the trophy BG ccaptioal op the world. Lots of BG will need to be removed (smallest, oldest, poorest condition, most stunted). Additional predators (LMB or HSB or ???) would benefit the pond. Buy Bob Lusk's "Basic Pond Management" book; read and follow the instructions (or alternatively, buy "Raising Trophy Bass" and do everything the book says backwards)(not really). Dr. Bruce Condello can be called in to bless your BG and give you a membership at BigBluegill.com (sort of a Pond Boss subsidiary).

If both species are important, you may have to make some of the moves toward a trophy BG pond, stopping when the mythical "balanced fishery" is achieved. (They DO exist, but they are also not stable without continuing management and adjustment). If you notice that all most of the management shemes require "work" to adjust them, remember that a great big part of that "work" is fishing.

Due to duplication, I am closing this topic here. See it's doppelganger in:

Evaluating and adjusting fish populations