Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations I think I'm going to be sick. UPDATE

Not sure how the potential DNA testing will be of a benefit, but who knows??

If the LMB (or some of them) turn out to be pure FL strain, I'm still not sure what that tells you. There are many places that sell pure FL strain bass, or claim to sell pure FL strain bass, so a FL bass can occur anywhere, truly.

Don't get me wrong though, I'm not saying you should not do some DNA testing. I'm just not sure the effort will clear up what happened.

I do see what you are saying about keeping some of the bass if they turn out to be some kind of desirable strain.

I am close to you and if I could help with your dilemma I would. Here are some things that come to mind. Flordia's are and have been in our area for at least 15 yr's based on my fishing. And Native Bass are also in our area, based on my fishing. And I am pretty sure a hybrid ( Mixed bloodlines of these bass ) have been (in the majority) of the biggest bass caught in Texas. If you take Lake Fork as an example, of the top 5 big bass caught in the lake, 4 were Hybrids and only 1 was a pure Florida. So does that mean anything? It tells me that, a very large LMB can be of mixed blood. And maybe you could say the Hybrid bites more and is easier to catch.
I hope it all works out for you. Life is good.

Even e-shocking won't remove all of them, but if done at the correct time of the year, you should be able to remove the majority of them, allowing you to continue with your goals for the pond.

Angling just removes the LMB that will bite, leaving the hook smart fish in the pond. The e-shock boat doesn't give the LMB that choice. If they are within the electric current field, they are stunned and can be netted out of the pond.

Since they hammered your forage base already, I don't think angling will remove enough of them to let your forage base rebound quickly. If a lot aren't removed, even stocking more forage will just be stocking food for the bass, and a lot of your newly stocked fish won't survive to spawn.

I don't really want any down time here if I can help it and I don't mind spending some money, though there is a point where I would be better off just killing everything off and starting over.
With this is mind is there any way to catch up with my forage without taking the vast majority of the bass out?
Can I stock enough smaller bream or a combination of smaller bream and ______ to catch up?

I do think that I have a good population of 6" plus CNBG, just no smaller ones.

While I agree that good anglers can put a hurt on fish in a smaller pond, but your pond is 2.5 times the size of the 2 ac pond that you and your buddy fished. Plus there's the aspect of taking out the most agressive biting LMB, leaving the smarter/less apt to bite fish to pass on their genes.

If it was my pond and I had the same goals as you do for the pond, I'd opt for the e-shock route.

As for forage fish, it all comes down to two things. Dollars and cents, and the carrying capacity of the pond.

Since this happened, you no longer have any idea of how many LMB are in the pond and what size they are. Yes, you caught roughly 100 cookie cutter LMB so the assumption could be that they are all the same size with the exception of a pair or two of larger fish. But, the bigger question is how many of them are still in the pond?

For a trophy LMB pond, the ratio is 20 to 30 BG/CNBG per LMB. That's for the stocker fish, not the offspring that they will be eating. So, yes, theoretically you can stock enough forage fish if your pocketbook was deep enough to afford stocking adult BG/CNBG AND you knew how many LMB were left in the pond to get the correct ratio. Remember, you want to stock BG/CNBG larger than what the LMB can eat or you are back to square one.

Rough rule of thumb, 10# of fish will put one pound of weight on one LMB.

Another guideline is to remove approximately 30# of LMB per surface acre in a LMB stunted pond per year (more if possible) to get the pond turned around as fast as possible with regards to the predator/forage fish base.

But, in your pond, the 800# gorilla in the pond is the number of LMB that are left in there. You know that there were enough to stunt in one year with the amount of forage fish that were in there.

Lets say you only had one female LMB pull off a spawn. A single female LMB, depending on maturity can lay between 2,000 and 94,000+ eggs. (Moyle
1976) So, how many made it to the size that you are catching?

That's why I'm recommending e-shocking the pond in early spring before the LMB spawn because the ones in the pond now are large enough to spawn too. So not only could you have the original pair spawn, you could possibly have 100's more spawning too.