Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Salvage Mission?

This weekends heavy rains flushed alot of our small BG through the spillway, I estimate that 10,000 to 25,000 BG averaging 2" got sucked down the spill tube. They are currently stacked in the drainage ditch like cordwood and the water there is getting thinner and thinner. I spent a small amount of time last night testing how easy they would be to salvage, here are the pictures. Note, it took me longer to walk down there than it did to dip net the gallon of BG in the net. My question is would it be worth the time to do this?

It would be to me.

I would say get em back. As long as you are sure there is nothing comming up stream; in order to keep out trash fish. Especially if it was easy.Hate to see em all become raccoon food.

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(Bruce, is that you?)

Shorty, it would be to me also but I don't know if it would be to you. You've talked many times about the heavy vegetation in your lake so you might have huge numbers of small BG already. It's a shame there isn't someone around that can use these fish. Could NEDOC use them as forage?

Norm, we have lots of small BG but 2-3" BG have been a rarity over the years. They are there this year simply because we removed 240 LMB last year in the 10" to 16-3/4" size range, that's alot of BG that didn't get eaten for a change. Right now the drainage ditch is fairly flat, runs 120 yards long and has a 24" drop before it "T"'s into another very small creek. I do know that farther downstream from there there are fatheads and GSF in this small creek primarily in some shallow holes. I think it's highly unlikey any of those exist in the drainage ditch below the pond as the water is just too shallow there. Due to the drought the drainage ditch is full of foxtail and cattails and would be impossible to sienne with a net. However, it would be possible to clear an opening to strech a sienne net acrros the ditch an simply walk downstream and heard them into the net, although I'm not sure two guys would be able to lift it up afterwards.

Right now I am trying to figure out if this is significant loss of BG or just an insigniicant small percentage that went down the spillway, I really don't have a good feel for it. Either way the remaining BG should see good growth rates due to increased invertabrate numbers. The other alternative is to do nothing and simply cull more LMB than I had planned to this year. Things have tendency to rebound after getting thinned down and with our pond having an extra 2ft of water this year both the LMB and BG should see a significant population boom later this year. To salvage or not to salvage? That is the question.

I would get a fraction of the 2-3" bluegill back out.

Shorty, I think your pond is around 10 acres?

So maybe try and do a rough calculation of how many bluegill you would have had per acre before the storm. Then compare that number to what you believe you lost.

If you want 'em back, Shorty, get 'em while they last.

Brettski, that's Bruce's twin brother. Here's Bruce:

Sunil, a 1994 UNL fisheries class estimated the BG population to be 8,654 with a 95% confidence interval of 520 to 18,236. The wide spread in the confidence interval is due to very low recapture rates of BG whose fins they clipped. This survey was also done after two years with lower than normal densities of weeds which helped the bass out eat their food source, meaning the BG population was way lower than normal at the time of the survey. At the time of the survey all of the LMB were skinny and big headed. Maybe Dr. Willis can explain this wide spread confidence interval better than I can but basically the estimate they made is not at all accurate.

Well, one thing I can say is that weedy conditions allow for all kinds of YOY fish to survive.

Two years back when my weeds were out of control, I'd take my boat out and paddle through the weedy water, and man-o-man, you would just see schools of all kinds of YOY fish.

Sunil, I made two trips last night, on the first trip I filled a 5 gallon bucket 1/2 full, within 5 minutes I had it filled to within 3" of the top with BG and water. They were gasping for air even before I got out of the ditch, I went much lighter on the second load which I took picures of. So between the two trips I have already salvaged 3 gallons of 2" BG without any water. My best guess is that that my salvage test put back 700-800 BG back into the pond and thats only a very small fraction of whats still in the 120 yard long drainage ditch.

Shorty many times in high water events BG and LMB go to cover to avoid the current. I would say that as a % of total BG that size a very small % went out. So what does that mean. If that many went out then there must be many times that still there. Further if you saw that big of an increase in 2-3in BG #s due to LMB removal last year then what will you see this year. Those LMB are gone and the BG that produced those #s are still there minus any natural morts.

Our outflow pipe on one pond is IIRC 48in. (big enough for me to easily climb down to the bottom on the ladder welded inside). I have watched from a boat as that pipe head went 2 ft underwater. The 3in BG could easily escape the flow as long as they stayed about 10 ft from the intake. Fifty yards from the pipe intake there was no current effect on the fish at all. All this is said to help you not to worry. The only time I have seen high water effect fish #s in a pond are when an emergency spillway event occurs ( water going out via a 30 ft wide and 3 feet deep spillway). Even then only a small % of the fish were effected.

I would still go salvage what I could .

Thanks ewest, I feel much better now. I will make an effort tomarrow night to salvage what I can, hopefully they will last that long in the shallow water they are in.

Shorty -- you were correct in your description of the confidence interval. They simply had so few recaptures that the estimate was not statistically reliable. They needed to sample more, which are the words that most commonly come out of a fishery biologist's mouth, I believe.

Dr. Willis, they sampled the pond over a three week period in the fall using active methods of electrofishing, beach siening, and passive methods using frame nets and gill nets, all fish had their fins clipped upon release. The other notes in their paper said they believed that the LMB were at 100% carrying capacity and the BG were at 50% carrying capacity. That was years ago though, much has changed since then. One thing I can say now is that pond will never be the same now that we have discovered Pond Boss, and that's a really good thing.

Shorty - maybe it means bluegills are smart! Catch me once; shame on you. Catch me twice (recapture after fin clippiing); shame on me!

Dave,

I think it was coined best by GW:

Fool me once, shame on ---shame on you. Fool me ---- you can't get fooled again.

Quoting Pete Townshend, of all people.

Perhaps Shorty's drainage ditch can now be called "Bluegill Wasteland."

Sunil, that would be an appropriate name, it stunk to high heaven the other night next to the discharge pipe, dead little BG and blow flies where thick in the "Wasteland", and those are just the one that didn't survive the fall through the pipe.

My dad made two trips yesterday with a 5 gallon bucket and salvaged 3 gallons of BG, the contents of each bucket overflowed the the dip net I posted a picture of yesterday. I'll be going out tonight to do some BG herding in the "teenage BG wasteland".

We made a decent effort last night salvaging BG, another 10 gallons got put back in the pond for a total of 16 gallons. My guess is that there were roughly 300 BG per gallon, that's almost 5000 BG getting returned to the pond or roughly 500 per acre so it was worth the time. My guess is that we salvaged somewhere between 20 and 40% of what actually went through the spill tube. There are still a lot of them down there.

Sounds like a Sat. am rescue job is in the works.

Maybe the start of a new forage pond.

ewest, I have a club tournament at a small KS lake Saturday morning to go to, but maybe Sunday morning if time allows. The other thing is the foxtail, bullrush, and cattails in the ditch make dip netting difficult, the BG swim right into that stuff to avoid the net. The 10 gallons we retrieved last night took about an hour to get, and that's with a 2" long hole in the bottom of the dip net which I fixed after we got done.