Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Should I kill all small LMB?

I am very new to pond management... I have been reading as much info as I can but decided to post this question to get 100% clarification. My pond is 15-20 years old and has always had decent size bass. It does have blue gill but not sure numbers. Last year we caught bass ranging from 2-5 pounds few and far between with no little bass. This year I have only caught 2 bass over 2 pounds and several bass 6-8 inches long. I am thinking to start chunking all small bass out of pond to let big bass feed and get bigger. This is probably very simple to most of you but any info would be a huge help to a newbie.

I dont know if this is important to this post but it is a 1 acre pond with natural shelter. tons of minnows schooling around the banks.

What are the size and species of all the fish in the pond? LMB need food that is roughly 1/4 their body length to grow well. From the initial 2 posts it seems that you don't have forage fish in there that are large enough for the larger LMB. They might be eating the smaller LMB.....

I know I have lots of minnows but I am not sure how many BG. I have to admit I haven't tried to fish for them. But haven't caught many. I have seen some schools near the bank at times so I know there is some. Last year when initially keeping track of caught fish I thought I probably had an over bass population because I only caught large fat bass and very few small ones. But, this year I started catching mostly little bass.

The thing about pond management is that you need to know for sure where your starting point is. Angling several times in a season or two will not give any real indication of the fish populations in your pond. You will need to go fishing a lot of times, keep records and do it year around for a year (one acre pond size). This takes patience with a capital P. The toughest thing is that the larger fish are smarter than the small ones. Your angling survey may be skewed by this factor and something to keep in mind.

If you don't have the patience to go through the angling process you should consider an electro-shock survey to find the elusive pond management starting point.

As esshup said you probably need those small Bass for forage for the larger ones.

The number one problem in privately owned water in Texas is LACK OF HARVEST of LMB. Esshup is right, you need to do an inventory of your fish. There are few easy estimates you can do yourself. First, go fishing, second get yourself a bag of fish food and toss some in every day at the same time in the same area and see what shows up, third you could set up a trap and see what you catch. If you use a trap, bait it with the same fish food. I like to put the fish food in a plastic lunch bag with holes in it to allow the smell to get out. Also, set you trap up in several places in the pond to see where fish are living.

Finally, if none of that works for you, consider hiring a professional to come out and electro-fish your pond, yes it does cost more, but if you really want to know, that is the surest method of knowing right away!

Yeah that what i hear about lack of harvesting. My pond was left unattended and unfished for a LONG time. I just got it cleared around it and started fishing it within the past couple years. So no fish have been harvested for a decade or two. Any fishing has been catch and release. I am keeping a log of all fish caught and recording length and weight. I would like to start harvesting some but afraid i may be setting pond back further if harvesting wrong. Even though it sounds like my main problem is over crowding every thing i read says there is nothing wrong with keeping and not releasing all the bass i catch under 12" or so. They eat the most BG and it will help with overall numbers of LMB. I am also looking into builiding some structure to aid in BG population