Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Feeding to Increase BG Size?

My pond is 3 years old and 2 acres. There is a good population of 3lb. or better LMB. There are also a lot of small bass 10-12". The BG are small 3-4". I have only culled about 20 of the smaller bass as they seem to be too numerous. The BG seem like they are not getting enough to eat and are being decimated by the bass as they try to spawn. There are also some CC from the original 200 I stocked. They are hard to catch and only weigh about a pound. I put them there so I would have something to eat but it isn't working out well.

I hate to kill the small bass so i am wondering if I started feeding would that be a good idea to help the BG and CC gain size?

Feeding will help. Do you have a plankton bloom (how far can you see into the water?)? Feeding and fertile water do not necessarily mean big healthy fish. It can result in just more of what you have ( small fish). The other key to a healthy fish population is appropriate harvest. Without a correct harvest plan you will have a difficult time reaching your goal.

The water is fairly murkey. Maybe 2 feet of visibilty. It has steep banks so there are not a lot of plants next to the edge. It sits in a pasture. I do have a some FA as well. I left a fair amount of cover in 4-6' of water.

I pretty much have it ingrained to release all bass but I dont think that works very well. i hate to kill them though. What plan would you reccommend? I think I read here that once you start feeding you pretty much have to keep it up?

If you dont want to eat the bass, then you could transport them somewhere else and turn them lose.

Where in VA are you Mark?

It's tough to get the catch and release mind set out of your head when it comes to bass. However, in small private ponds, the harvesting of bass is absolutely necessary to maintain a balanced fishery. From the sounds of it, you need to heavily harvest the smaller bass, this will allow more BG to reach larger sizes. They will in turn reach a size your bigger bass prefer to feed on and start to balance the pond out better.

I would have to have more information to give you advice Mark. Are you absolutely sure you've captured enough fish to make a good judgement of the population dynamics?

Harvest some of the bass IF you want a trophy bass pond, or if you want to catch some good bass and possibly some decent bluegill. However, if you want trophy bluegill, harvesting any significant number of bass will make the situation worse rather than better as the bluegill will overpopulate, and probably pretty quickly. Rule number one of growing large bluegill is to ALLOW the predators, in this case and usually in ponds LMB, to overpopulate, so that the bluegill cannot overpopulate; the bluegill that live have all the food that they can eat, and grow very quickly and will reach sizes several times that of a pond with any other population dynamic, including a balanced one. This is widely accepted in the field of pond management, and is espoused by everyone from the founder of this site to just about any state game and fish agency that offers specific advice on growing trophy bluegill. Here again, if trophy bass are your goal, by all means you need to harvest smaller bass and several of them, because you want fewer bass; the bass that are left in the pond will have all the small bluegill their hearts could ever desire, with none of the bluegill exceeding the size they can swallow.

If, on the other hand, bluegill are your first priority, you may need to apply alum. If by murky you mean tending towards muddy, muddy water doesn't have much plankton, which is the base of the food chain in a pond, and a primary food source for bluegill. If your water is muddy, your bluegill could be small simply because that's all they've grown in two years due to not much to eat. If you get your water cleared up, AND maintain the bass-heavy status so the bluegill don't explode in population like Ewest cautions against which could easily happen if the bass are thinned, then clearing the water and then fertilizing will give you a food chain about ten times more productive for the bluegill than what you have right now. Assuming you truly are bass-crowded, which is key to this equation, the bluegill will start growing much, much faster. If you then feed on top of this, they'll double or triple in size within a year.

They will grow much faster if you feed, even without fertilization. But it sounds to me like right now they're small simply because you have a bad food chain for them, i.e. not much plankton.

Can you take some photos of your water?

Thanks for the replies! I will take some pics next week. I stocked the pond (2.14 ac.) 3 years ago with 200 LMB, 700BG, 200 CC, 2000FHM, 200 crawfish and snails all at the same time. The pond has been a challenge as it leaks and will draw down as much as 4'. Currently it is full and beautiful with clarity to about 2 1/2 -3 feet. Will verify.

There are a good number of very nice bass from the original stockin but i have never seen a BG over 4" or CC over12-13". There are alot of 10-12" bass and 2-3" BG. A LMB inhaled a 4" BG i had fowl hooked the other night. All these fish are very aggressive as I dont fish it much.

All in all I am very happy with the big bass but am concerned my release all bass mentality is a poor plan for this small pond.

Should I simply say keep all bass under 12" unless you can identify them as females? Does this sound like a plan or is it too simple?

I am assuming I have decent plankton. Is there a specific test to verify nutrient content or is it subjective based on visual inspection? Thanks again!

The catch and release mentality is hard to shake after 20 years of bass fishing. The bass fishing "industry" definitely changed the way we think. They turned a relaxing pastime into a big money "sport" Thats why I quit bass fishing 12 years ago until I built my own pond. Now I enjoy it again.

I am in Fauquier County. The pond is in Hume.

If you can see three feet down, or even two and a half, you don't have much plankton. The standard advice for determining when it's time to fertilize is to lower a bright white-and black object (Secchi disk, or anything those colors and bright) into the water, and if you can see it more than eighteen inches down, you need to fertilize. I'm guessing you could probably see it four feet or more down at the moment, if you can see normal not-bright stuff at three feet. So basically right now your pond has about one-fifth to one-tenth of the carrying potential it could have if fertilized. What that translates to in terms of your bluegill is they're going to grow about five to ten times slower than they would in a properly fertilized pond with a good plankton bloom. Such a pond would have water that is very green; at times you can even see millions of microscopic little critters surging and flowing right under the surface almost like a little ocean of life - saw this about a month ago in a five-acre pond I'm managing, and it's pretty cool. But normally the water is just very green, and you can't see far down into it, and the fish are growing like crazy as you stand there looking at it. Within a short time of when you start fertilizing you'll start to see a boom in all kinds of little critters, from crayfish to pond snails to waterbugs to lots of other assorted potential food items for fish that you've never previously seen, or not to any significant extent; they become more abundant because they like your small fish eat plankton and the tiny critters that eat plankton, and suddenly there's more food for everybody, so everybody has a party and starts propagating. It's pretty awesome.

As to whether to keep some bass, this just comes down to your goals for the pond. Are you primarily interested in catching trophy-size bass? If so, you need to be harvesting some of the smaller ones so the ones that live have all they can eat all the time. But this is going to give you more small bluegill, not fewer, as there won't be enough bass to keep them in check. But that's the idea - for the bigger bass to have not too much competition, and to have available all the bluegill they could ever want to eat.

You can still get your bluegill significantly bigger by fertilizing, though I'm a little concerned now that they may already be on the crowded side since you said you have a lot in the 2-3" range. If they are indeed already tending towards overpopulation, fertilization will help your bass because the bluegill will spawn more as Ewest noted and the bass will have a small bluegill bonanza. But you want to be careful that the bluegill don't get too out of hand because they can get so overcrowded that they eat all of the bass fry each year as soon as they're hatched and within a few years you could have a pond with no bass and tens of thousands of badly-stunted bluegill that never exceed three inches. Read this thread:

Bass Culling...HELP?

Take some pictures of a couple or three or four bluegill from your pond when you take pictures of the water (which sounds like it isn't muddy now, if you can see three feet down).

Installing two or three automatic feeders would be a sure-fire way to increase the size of your bluegill, even if you start thinning your bass. The bluegill won't grow as fast as they would in a bass-heavy situation, but they'll still get many times larger than they would without the supplemental food; you can reasonably expect to catch some in the pound range within two and a half to three years, possibly sooner if you fertilize.

Walt and jeff great replies! I will try to get some accurate data next week and some pictures. I assumed I had decent plankton but maybe I don't after all. The water is not green as you described. When i filled it it was very clear and i got a lot of FA. That condition has improved but I still have a moderate amount of FA.

The few 20-30 bass I have culled i have killed and thrown back in so the CC and crayfish could benefit. I would say that I catch 10 small bass for every big one. That is just a WAG though as the size and catch rate depend on the lure I am using.

Thanks again. I will try to get more specific data.

Fertilizing will eliminate your FA problem, as long as it's not prevalent throughout the pond already. Initially it may grow more for a few days, but once the plankton bloom happens the sunlight stops penetrating down through the water and the FA dies off.

I'd say harvesting 30-40 pounds of bass per acre, per year, would be a good starting point, per Greg Grimes' recommendation in the thread I tried to link to above.

I would skip gizzard shad, as I've read that often they don't make much difference for the bass but do end up overrunning the pond. And they'll kill your bluegill growth because they eat plankton.

Mark, I've got several friends who live in Fauquier County. Mostly in the Catlett and Midland areas, the complete opposite side of the county of you. Your area of Fauquier is quite nice, beautiful horse country! Sounds like you do need to start culling some of those smaller bass. If you need help thinning them out let me know...

Trying to post a pic of the pond from photobucket.

It worked and dang that's a beautiful pond!

When its full it really is.

What a great looking pond!

Very nice looking Mark! I love the shape...

Nice place ya got there Mark!

Thanks Guys! It is beautiful now but it leaks pretty bad. I have battling this pond for 3 years. It was not cored or lined right I believe. We have had a lot of rain this year in the east so it is full now. I will post pics to compare in August. If we go into a bad dry spell I can easily lose 3feet of water or more.

Yes Mark, we sure have gotten a lot of rain here in Virginia!

Here in California we deal with large fluxations in the levels of a pond (well at least in the Sierra Nevada foothills). Once spring is over we don't get much rain until late fall and evaporation takes it's toll. DIED's pond and mine routinely drop 5-6 feet per year. Bad years (like last year) it was more like 7 feet.

Mark, nice place. Yes, of course feeding will increase BG and CC sizes. In 2+ acres, I would use 2 feeders and Purina Game Fish Chow. It's 32% protein is all BG and CC need.
BTW, I have found that cut bait (bluegill) is a great catfish bait.

Here is a raft I made to put a feeder on. I have it anchored in 5'of water. Hopefully this will keep bears out.