Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Very small pond advice, w/pics

According to this info on Maryland's DNR website, longnose do in fact get much larger than largemouth, by about three and a quarter feet, as the world record was six feet in length and they commonly reach three to four feet:

http://www.dnr.state.md.us/fisheries/fishfacts/longnose_gar.asp

With the size of the sunfish in that pond, one longnose gar could easily eat every one of them. Not to beat a dead horse, just know when I'm right. The world-record largemouth was 32.5 inches long. And of course the average largemouth even in good waters is generally fourteen inches or less, so there's a two- to three-foot difference in the average size attained by the two species.

The perch trap is a great idea. Keep us posted on your progress!

Also, make sure you feed at the same time every day as that will get the fish acclimated to it much quicker.

A 6 It's pretty much all about mouth size, that determines what kinda prey a fish can eat. A giant longnose gar of that size still has a small mouth compared to a largemouth bass. Most gar end up as largemouth bass candy because of their easy to swallow shape...

Have you ever seen a longnose gar? Because I've seen more than one, in the wild and up close, usually in a river. Every longnose I've ever seen was several times bigger than what any largemouth, even were it the world record, could hope to eat without dying in the process. I've seen them lazily swimming along the surface more than once, and never witnessed a largemouth try to eat one.

And a three-foot longnose, I promise you, can eat as large or larger fish than any largemouth. Their mouths are narrow, but they're also much longer than a largemouth's, and even horizontally are more than big enough to eat a bull bluegill, or good-sized bass, once they get to a decent size. But there aren't even any fish at all in the pond under discussion, from what we've been told, that would be even a slight problem for even a small longnose to swallow. My point was - and this can readily be corroborated with research online, won't take much - that the longnose is a very aggressive predator, and that further, since they grow much larger than largemouth and therefore probably faster as well, it very easily could clean out every fish in that pond.

I've kept them in aquariums, I've shot them with my bow and hooked several over the years while fishing and lost most before I could land them cause their teeth are nasty. Those big 3 ft gar are the lucky few that didn't get gobbled up by largemouth bass when they were but a 6" longnose gar. Young gar are very good at imitating a floating stick. They just sit motionless on the surface. They are very fast and will skip out of the water when chased. But most still get eaten long before they reach 3 feet long. And even at 3 feet, there mouth's are not that big.

Here's a 3 ft long gar:


Not a very big mouth... Probably the size mouth of a 14" largemouth.