Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Increasing forage in pond with existing bass

How do you increase forage in an pond with existing bass ? Dumping in a few thousand 2"-4" bluegill seems like I'd only be creating a nice temporary buffet for the existing fish. The pond(~ 4 acres) is around 9 or 10 years old and has never been managed and rarely fished. I'm hoping to change that. Recently, I fished the pond for an hour and caught 10 bass, all between 13" and 15". Obviously, the pond needs some kind of culling operation. A few years ago, 4 plus pound bass were caught.

Adding forage to a bass pond is sometimes like adding chickens into a large pen with numerous foxes. For a more balanced fish community containing LMB where the population is skewed toward smaller bass, the wisest plan is to remove a significant number of the bass(foxes). When done correctly this allows more forage item to survive and thrive to annually produce forage for the predator population. Forage species can be supplemented with pellet feeding and improving the habitat, usually refuge areas to allow BG to survive long enough to grow to a decent size. Numerous conditions create too many bass and too few forage items. Generally you should have at lease 20-30 times more forage fish than predators. A good fish sampling program/method will show the ratio of predator to forage.

I appreciate your input. You mentioned pellet feeding. I once acquired pellet trained bass from an Oklahoma hatchery for another pond, but they were pre-trained at the hatchery. Is it possible to get bass that haven't been exposed to feed pellets to feed on them ?