Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Corrective stocking 6 acre pond problems

I regularly fish a 6 acre pond with a lot of little ponds around it (1/2 acre or so). It has LMB, CC, BG, crappie, and fhm. The cc and crappie are thriving, the bass are stunted at about 10", and the BG are getting rarer every year. Now when I say the crappie are thriving, that doesn't mean they are taking over, It means that when I do catch them they are 13-14". The CC are 3-10 lbs, and are regularly fed (feline) catfood. The BG are what most people go after when they fish and regularly take out 50 or so at a time throughout the summer for fish frys. I have been culling bass when I fish it, because of the stunting and to help get the BG numbers back up, but I'm afraid if I cull too many, the crappie will take over. This pond is a square pond, deep on one end (18'), shallow on the other, it has very little cover once the weeds are killed off in late April. (it is also a swimming pond)

Also in the last 5 years or so muscles have been showing up in larger numbers.

A lot of random info, I know, but what should I do? I prefer to eat BG and crappie, but I don't want them taking over either.

Interesting questions Z. Keeping your crappie population under control, but wanting to give your BG population a boost. I don't have an answer, but I'm very interested to see the responses.

You are going to struggle mightily to achieve that goal. Between the food chain being top heavy on predator fish and lack of cover for forage fish I could see you never getting close to your desire. I would be surprised if you have hardly any FHM left, and small bg would probably be rare also. To many mouths to feed and not enough food. I'd sacrifice the cc's. Even if you are supplement feeding them with cat food, being that big they eat everything and anything. Thin out your LMB, take out most of the CC. Establish forage cover, anyway you can. Hopefully the remaining bg can repopulate. The crappie will hang in there as well. But without adding bg or more fhm, and or forage cover, it will be an uphill battle no matter what.

I'll get some people together to take out some serious CC then. And I'll continue to cull the bass. After reading that i should only have 50 lbs of predator fish/acre, I realized we have way to many cats in there. Has anyone had any experience getting rid of muscles or is that an exercise in futility? What do muscles do for or against the ecology of the pond? The reason we want them out is because we've had a couple kids slice their foot open on them while swimming.

RES eat mussels, but once the mussels get about 1/2" in size, they get to be too big for them to eat. The only way that I know of getting them out is hand picking or raking. You could try and kill them, but the shells would still be left.

Sea Otters might work as well, but I don't know how you'd convince them to stay once you got them there.

This a QUESTION., I have a 1 acre pond 18 foot deep. pond is clear want to add liquid fertilizer, at what rate should i use? Also i stocked 50 6 to 8 inch blue cats 100 4-6 inch cnbg., 17 6- 8 inch lgm bass. AND it allready has a populatin of 5--7 inch cnbg and red ear, stocked 3 years ago., 80 of each. I recently just stocked the blue catfish, new cnbg, and new 6-8 inch lmb.AND 3 GRASS CARP. ----so my question is HOW MANY MORE LMB at 6-8 inch can i stock. In this pond not causing over stocking... for max lmb growth?? AND ALSO HOW MUCH LIQUID FERTILIZER IN A 1 ACRE POND,? 95 DEGREE TEMPS. POND IS LOCATED IN CENTRAL TEXAS. THANKS FOR ANY AND ALL INPUT.