Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations 20/25 acre conservation lake

New here and had a couple of questions. I am trying to figure out the fish situation in a conservation lake I currently fish. I caught over 80 bass this past Saturday. All of the fish where in the 1 1/2lb - 2lb range except for 3 or 4 5lb fish mixed in. I also caught a dozen of the biggest bluegill I have ever seen on spinnerbaits and senkos. (5/0 hooks!). I have been fishing this lake for about 3 months and all that is being caught are smaller fish (bass). There is a very nice (large) bluegill population. But, I have not caught any bluegill in smaller sizes much less seen any. I have the help of a few others to manage this place and I am trying to figure out the scenario. So, tons of small bass everywhere, huge full grown bluegill but not seeing any smaller bluegill. Not sure about Catfish population. Does this lake have a stunted overpopulation of bass or what? I am not sure how long this lake has been around. I know over 15 years for sure. I have started to remove the 1 1/2 - 2 lb bass and some of these huge bluegill. I have only removed probably 2 dozen bluegills, but I have removed 120 bass in the last week just by angling. What I would like to achieve is a nice (big bass) LMB population above anything else. Bare with a rookie when it comes to this stuff. What are your suggestions. Leave the huge bluegill and take out 500lbs of bass (more/less) before spawn and take the bluegills to. Thank you everyone. This is a wonderful website by the way!

Lots of vegetation, no real structure except for old fence rows. Deepest is probably 20 feet close to dam with probably 5 acres of shallow 3-6 feet of water on the other end.

Alan

Since none of the experts have yet addressed your question and since it has been knocked off the front page by what appears to be advertising, I will give a non-expert's answer. You are almost certainly overpopulated with bass. They are eating everything in the desirable size range and are forced to forage for bluegill too small to offer a good return on the investment of energy required to catch them. The pattern of many easily caught small bass and very large bluegill is classic for this. I would bet that the bass you are catching have relatively large heads for their body size.

The large bluegill are protected from predation by their size and body shape. I would leave them in the lake for breeding purposes for now. I would take out every bass, no matter the size, for a total of at least 1,000 lb. a year. Even the larger ones have probably passed their growth peaks and will never get really big.

Then I would re-evaluate and keep up the same fishing pressure but allow the larger bass to remain and take out as many large bluegill as desired. The really big bluegill are probably near the end of their lives, and you will end up losing the very large bream sizes as your populations come into balance.

You might speed up the recovery by a consistent program of fertilizing your pond and/or feeding the bluegills pelletized food. Ideally, you could have the pond electrofished now and in the future to see how bad things are and how much progress you have made.

More structure later on would be good but for now, you don't seem to need to concentrate the fish.
I hope this helps.
Lou

Thank you Lou. I appreciate the advice! Big overpopulation is what I was afraid of.

Alan:

I am not an expert. Is there any chance the property owner (if it isn't you), is managing it for large bluegills? If so, the "bass heavy" status might be intentional. I would be a little leary of removing the large bluegill due to early findings of this project.

http://www.inhs.uiuc.edu/cae/research/currentproj.html

Realistically though, you should be able to remove a lot of fish in a lake that size.

If not managed for bluegills, I'd concentrate on removing a whole lot of the smaller bass and toss the big ones back.

Jeff

I manage a lake in Southern California with an identical situation as yours.

I would suggest culling all bass under 15" out at a rate of a minimum of 20 lbs. per acre. You should be sampling all fish you catch and cull to determine relative weights. With RW data you can then determine a base of the condition of your bass at the start of aggressive culling and watch the changes of RW over time.

I would not be removing any of the bluegill as they are supporting the bass population. Get the bass population reduced so that you start seeing a big number of bass over 15" with a RW of better than 1.0. I then would add additional bluegill (6" bluegill would offer the highest survival rate)at a rate of 250 or more per acre.

In addition, if possible introduce threadfin shad. The threadfin shad will reduce the pressure on the bluegill population and diversify the food base for the intermediate size bass as well as large bass.

Dave