Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Managing black crappie

Hey guys! Been viewing some threads for a while and finally made an account! Anyway, A buddy and I want to 'fix' a pond that our fathers built about 5 years ago, that they have since given up on. The pond is roughly 21-22 acres, with a max depth of about 24 feet, with a few humps and sunken tress here and there. Most of the pond is around 14-16 feet, and very clear. The current species that are in there are Black Crappie, Bluegill, Largemouth bass, and 6 little Walleye. The pond is currently dominated by the crappie. tons of 6-7" , tons of little 2-5", and a pretty decent amount of 8" and above. Bluegill can be caught, most around the 5-7" range, a few bigger ones. We have only seen 4-5 largies, but all seemed to be at least 3-4 lbs. about a week ago we put 6 walleye in there, ranging from 9-13". The crappie are all pretty skinny, but we've recently been doing our best to supplement the pond with shiners and fatheads. Our current plan is to hit the crappie as hard as we can when the ice melts when they stage for spawn, but that will only do so much. Other than harvesting them, what are some other ways to help control the crappie population/increase the amount of walleyes and bass, mainly walleye? We've thought about adding some musky possibly, but that might affect the Eyes and bass. Introducing crayfish was another thought to provide some other food sources, but we are both seniors in high school, and don't have a ton of cash to throw at this project. Any thoughts, criticisms, questions and anything else is appreciated!
Thanks!

Welcome to Pond Boss!!!

22 acres is HEAVEN!!!!!

The size of your pond (really a small lake) makes the management of it, towards a desired outcome, more challenging.

You've either got labor/sweat, or money, or a combination of both.

If you got an army of fishermen together in the spring, and tried to remove every Black Crappie you caught, it would probably have some effect towards goals (which need to be defined). I think you'd be looking to try and remove at least (100) Crappie/acre, so over 2,000 fish. Quite an effort.

For muskie stocking, I think you'd want Tiger Muskie as they would not reproduce. At least one per acre would be need to make a dent in the Black Crappie, and probable more like 2-3/acre.

Hey Sunil, thanks for the warm welcome and great advice! Finding/buying tiger muskies would be a little difficult, given delivery costs and the costs of the fish themselves, but I’m talking to some hatcheries to see if I can just pick them up myself to eliminate the delivery costs. As for goals, my friend and I are hoping to have a nice walleye fishery, and still have some nice catchable crappie (not this many though!). In our eyes, the bass are just an awesome bonus fish, and we aren’t super worried about them, but keeping a decent population of decent sized bass in there would be pretty awesome. Also, having a small population of reproducing, pure strain Muskie would be kinda cool, but would that hurt the Eyes or bass?

Most of the time when your black crappie are overpopulated like that they are also hungry, a couple guys on a mission could make a heck of a dent in your population, if they are big enough to filet at all you will have some really good eating, once you find the main spots where they hang out and what color slider they hit best you can slay em,
when they go on a spawn, me and my side kick have pulled 100 off of a brush pile in very little over an hr if that long.
Neighbor has a 3 acre lake that gets over populated with white crappie every several yrs because he doesnt fish them out regularly enough, we have pulled 450 out of it in a few weeks time in the spring, because his lake gets overgrown with duckweed in the summer, cant fish it at all during the summer.
Good Luck!

I'm not sure what kind of environment pure muskies need to spawn, but further, I'm not sure how you'd keep control over a muskie population that spawns and recruits.

Any muskies, tiger or other, are going to eat indiscriminately, however, depending on if you get stockers of all similar size, they will move through slot limits of food, to a degree, and perhaps allow some other fish to grow in parallel.

Maybe you could get 20 tiger muskies, and an army of crappie fisherman. That would make some kind of impact.

Gehajake, good to know! They are all pretty skinny, or most of them were until we started supplementing w FHM and Shiners, even the 5-6” Crappies will try and eat a 3-4” shiner!

I forgot to mention, one of our members, 'Snipe," has been doing a lot of nice work with Saugeye. They might have a role in this.

One word.... SAUGEYE. these fish would absolutely turn your BCP situation into a much more desired structure of many more large and medium size crappie showing up every year (12-15").

Howdy MnAngler,

So the pond is 5 years old and totally out of whack. Can you shed any light on how it was stocked. For example, stocking rates of LMB, BG, and Crappie? Also can you make a good estimate of the percentages of the different sizes of crappie (eg 70% 2-5", 25% 5-7", 5% 7-10"). This would be very helpful in terms of estimating populations.

This pond is what is known as forage locked. It can happen with any forage but BCP and GSHD are two very prone to locking up the biome. So a couple of things might have caused it. Bucket stocking adult fish is one possible cause. So Nature abhors a vacuum, and if this was the case, the initial stocking did not take up enough of the carry capacity the first growing season. Such would lead to the crappie filling that vacuum being a an early spawner. There may have been a suitable stocking of fingerlings, but subsequently over harvest of the LMB before successfully recruiting may have occurred. Whatever the case, it is clear that the LMB are severely under populated.

So how do I know the pond is forage locked? There are two year classes of slow growing BCP and the LMB have grown well. In other words, the LMB are growing at a decent pace (getting most of what they can eat) but they are not keeping up with either of these year classes. The current situation is probably one where no species in the pond can successfully recruit without significant mortality of the populations. So gehajake made a good suggestion, don't be picky about the size. Get a bunch of those BCP out of there. For now, do not remove predators of any size. You need some large predators that are big enough to consume at least the 2-5" year class that is abundant. If you don't stock them large enough, they will not grow fast enough to make a noticeable impact and could even decline from competitive pressures.

I could make an estimate of how many large predators to stock if I had a better understanding of the population structure (the percentages of the size brackets).

In highly forage deficient waters you need size and age information. Those 4 inch BC could be 1 , 2 or even 3+ years old. Here are 3 1 yr old LMB from such a situation.

Hey jpsdad! I’d say roughly 25% of the BCP are the 0-5” range, 50% are 6-10”, 15% are 11-12” and the remaining % are above 12”. In terms of how it was stocked, I don’t really know. Most of the stocking was done at the very start of the pond, and mainly just consisted of ordering the big crappie from farms and throwing them in there

MnAngler,

The numbers above do not jive with what you said earlier. You said there were tons of 2"-5" and tons of 6"-7" and a decent amount larger than that. From that, I thought you had an enormous population of BCP stunting at 6-7 inches and growing very slow. Based on your latest numbers above, these are normal healthy lengths distributions for most farm ponds. The proportions both in population and biomass favor harvestable sized fish. Based on your latest entry, there is nothing wrong (at least nothing seriously wrong). I don't know what the lake could carry per acre. Bill would you have any idea?

Just tentative tongue in cheek, limiting the BCP carry to 150 lbs/acre, assuming 70 RW, and using your stated proportions in the catch .. I come up with a population of no more than 940 BCP per acre. More than 50% of crappie biomass is > 10" and More than 75% of the biomass is > 8". What are you complaining about? Just harvest the crappie. Per your population percentages I estimate ~320 BCP/acre > 8". Don't pick on any particular size > 8", just take them that size and larger. Don't throw nothing that size back until the proportion of >10" isn't 15% any more. When the proportion is "right" it will be about 9%. That is, 1 >10" BCP for every 11 you catch. This should be all that is needed to improve condition and growth of the BCP. The numbers are fairly limited, I would be surprised if the standing weight of BCP is greater than 150 lbs/acre but if it is you will know if after indiscriminately harvesting 160 >8" BCP/acre you are still catching more than 1 >10" BCP for every 11 BCP you catch.

On the other hand, if you can't trust the information you gave me, then don't trust the analysis that came from it. Use your best judgment there and good luck with this. Sounds like a really fun project. Below is a breakdown of your data. Biomass is calculated based on your thin comment at 70 RW.

Thanks for all the info/stats jpsdad! Your numbers are actually very close to what my buddy and I discovered this ice season, a lot of crappie around that 7-8" range. It just seems no matter the size of fish, they all seem malnourished, and there's so many of them. I don't know how familiar people on here are with Garmin Livescope, but I will include some pictures from us drilling/hole hopping on the pond during the ice season.
I'm just unsure what next steps my buddy and I should take, other than taking a ton of crappie. We'd like to have a nice walleye/crappie pond we can fish, but we both think we should try and take care of the forage situation first. From what I've read, FHM can provide a little 'boost' in growth but aren't really a long-term fix. I was stocking shiners but now the baits shops I go to can't get shiners in until the MN Walleye opener.
As for stocking predators, what size of Tigers should we look into throwing in there? The place I'm looking at will sell 6-7" fish mainly. And are there any places in MN that will sell Saugeye for stocking? I've only seen pure walleye available.
Again, thank you everyone for all the info/suggestions, I really appreciate it!

If you could get various sizes of Tiger Muskie, it would be beneficial, but if you can only source 6-7" Tiger Muskie, then you have to go with it.

You may experience some predation on 6-7" Tiger Muskie depending on what other larger predators you have across the 22 acres, but you could make up for that in the initial stocking numbers.

Maybe go with (4) Tiger Muskie per acre, or an even 100 Tiger Muskie.

Along with that, do massive culling on all Black Crappie you catch, unless you catch a particularly large one or healthy one (only because BC is one of your desired species).

I think you'll have a hard time getting any kind of forage base established until you get your over-population problem corrected.

Regarding Saugeye, you should send Snipe a private message through the website and see if he can help you in any way.

I'd have Saugeye if they were readily available. I agree with the sentiment that it'll be difficult to establish more forage if you're already over crowded with predators.


I have a 19 acre pond. A couple of years ago I decided to start removing a significant amount of crappie. We fish more and invite friends out more. To be honest with you it's been a blast! Currently I believe I'm seeing a positive change in both length and weights of the crappie we are catching.

If you really want to cull a bunch of crappie, then a fishing derby is an excellent idea.

Do you know any Boy Scouts at school? If you had two scout troops come out with some leaders that want to teach fishing, they could catch a bunch of crappie when they are biting good.

I would make sure to determine what lures/baits are successful at catching your walleye, and insist that they do NOT use those baits. Also don't allow any live baits that you don't want in your pond. There is always a chance that a few will live (but probably unlikely).

I would also enforce a rule to throw back any fatter/heavier crappie. If they are mostly catching crappie that are X" long, then you might tell them to cull every skinny crappie within an inch of that length to either side. Or, if they all look skinny, then have them cull every single crappie they catch. I don't believe you can fish the crappie out of a 22-acre pond unless you also have a mass of predators.

I wish I could get BCP to even spawn !

MnAngler,

After you had responded with the latest population estimates, the predator situation did not appear severely under represented. That is why I didn't make recommendations for stocking predators. If you notice the 5-7 group, they are not that numerous. They may occasionally be eaten by 4 lb LMB. Also they will grow into the 7-10 group when you harvest BCP in the 7-10 group. Same thing goes for members of the 7-10 group that you don't harvest. They will grow into the 10+ group. You do need some small BCP surviving to become 8" or 10" or 12" some day. You have a top heavy population. There isn't enough BCP in the bottom two classes to impact the overall health and condition of BCP by harvesting them or submitting them to predation. Just doesn't make sense to pick on them. Their Biomass is too small to have much of an impact. Leave them for you 4 lb LMB to eat and the remaining to grow up some day. What kind of condition are LMB in? Are they fat? I did also try to balance an LMB population to the BCP and a very modest population of BG. One thing that concerned me was whether, given the top heavy BCP population, they may be a bit thin. I would like to know more about their condition before I could make any recs for adding predators.

Anyways, again, the BCP population is top heavy. They are thin because the food is limited. If you take away 37.5% of the Biomass by taking half the fish in the top two tiers ... the population will replace that biomass. Right now ... they may make a length increment ... but they cannot add weight when they have already filled the carry capacity. They just stay the same weight while the RW declines and they grow a little longer. Predators cannot help a top heavy forage fish population. Predators consume YOY and juvenile sized fish primarily. You are going to have to be the predator of 8" to 12" BCP. Again, I am just not sure you need any more predators, that is why I am not making a recommendation to stock extra at this time.

MnAngler,

After re-reading your last post I would like to comment on a couple of things. You said:


Just so that you understand, I didn't pluck any numbers out of thin air. All numbers were provided by you and I just did some analysis with your numbers. Nothing else. "My numbers" are "your numbers" expressed in a different format. To get good advice on balance, it is important to have an accurate understanding of populations. Your inch ranges have moved around a lot and I think you are trying to rely on memory of a very limited sampling. No fault there, I know you are trying to provide an accurate picture. I would just say, that if you aren't providing accurate information, the analysis will also reflect the same inaccuracy. If you are serious about managing this BOW at its peak performance, you will need a very accurate understanding of population proportions. At the very least, length measurements. I could work with length measurements and a gross weight too. But we need good data, not memory, if we are to truly do good analysis and make effective recommendations. Furthermore, good data on all species is really important. Good observations on year class recruitment or recruitment failure is also important.

I mentioned earlier that there is a food limitation. Your observations are evidence of that. Lets say your crappie are 70 RW (just hypothetically), what this means is that last year they were missing 30% of what they needed for maintenance at 100 RW. Give or take 3% or so. Let's say your pond produces the food required to support 150 lbs/crappie of crappie (just hypothetically). The support they need (in Minnesota) adds up to around 0.8 lbs of ingested animal dry matter. So around 120 lbs/acre. If they weigh 150 lbs/acre, you can rest assured they are getting it. But they needed (120/0.70=171 lbs) of animal dry matter. They get their ration from various pond organisms with various % dry matter content. The weighted average of that consumption would tell you the total weight of what they were eating. But lets just use shiners as an example. They are about 25% dry matter. So the difference of what they needed to be 100 RW is (51 x 4~200 lbs) of live shiners for each and every acre. Around a 4400 lbs shortfall of shiner forage overall for the BOW. If one didn't mind paying that every year then one could increase the carry capacity and fatten the hypothetical 150 lbs to 215 lbs. Now each and every year there after one would need to supplement the same 4400 lbs of shiners to maintain the same 215 carry capacity. Growth after the initial year will still depend on mortality. What ever (reasonable <50%) percent of the biomass dies, that percent will be replaced to fill the carry capacity. For BOWs that have reached carry capacity, highest growth will always be associated with the highest mortality. This is an immutable law that cannot be sidestepped without unlimited food supplementation (something that will lead to mass mortality anyway).

What is wrong with the BOW isn't really a food limitation. The condition of the BCP reflects the balance of food and the population numbers. There are too many BCP in the larger sizes to be supported in good condition. Their biomass at 100 RW requires more maintenance than the BOW can provide. Now it may well be producing a lot of food. Consider what 150 lbs of crappie need in terms of equivalent shiner consumption. Around 480 lbs equivalent or 9600 lbs of shiner equivalent produced annually. How much value is there(maybe $96,000)? All you have to do is bring your population into balance with this valuable natural production of food and the size and condition will be good. Mortality is the key to growth. You need to harvest a minimum of 20% of the biomass of > 8" BCP standing weight each year. Because it has been neglected for years, I recommended 37.5% this year. I don't think I would go beyond that number and would probably ease it back to 20 - 25% next year and following years.

There are ways to estimate population numbers (and biomass)from marking and recapture. I don't know how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole. Given the size of the BOW and the potential quantity of fish needing harvest, I think your plate is pretty full even getting close to the harvest needed. Whatever you do on that front should benefit the fish remaining even if you don't notice it by casual observation.

Pat, how do you get BCP to NOT spawn in south Texas?

If you could figure that out and apply it to other ponds, I think you could be a multi-millionaire pond manager.

All joking aside, I don't think I have ever seen a question on Pond Boss about providing increased spawning habitat for crappie. They seem to find a way to utilize whatever habitat that is remotely close to their preferred conditions.

Any ideas on what is different in your pond? Might start an interesting discussion among the experts?

Actually, contrary to popular belief, I have not seen the overpopulating problem nearly as bad with BCP, I personally fish in a number of ponds that have them and am not aware of a single one, where they are in a mix with LMB, or otherwise actually, that they overpopulate to the point of being stunted.
Now I cant say the same for WCP, I do fish a pond I know of where they overpopulate pretty bad, and also, I think the LMB in that pond have been decimated pretty bad by otters, used to have nice big LMB in it but not anymore.
Like Catscratch said, few things are more fun, or tasty, then trying to thin out a pond with too many BCP in it. and although I've not seen it in BCP, I do know that WCP, after you take a bunch of them out, you will see a definitive difference in size and weight in them in as little as a yr later.

I have 10+ LMB in my 6 acre pond that love to eat any size BCP that they can find. I used to catch quite a few but now can maybe get one in an hour of fishing for them. My neighbors have the same issue. To many LMB and way to many BG have stopped even LMB from pulling off a spawn. Have watched the BG raid LMB nests for several years.

Those dang LMB are going to town on your BCP. Though you wanted a BCP pond ... you have an absolutely awesome LMB pond that most everyone would be envious of.

To maintain the LMB fishery, you need recruits. Eventually your big old LMB will die. Some kind of ladder at 1 female per acre-year in the 1 to 2 lb range could help to buffer you for this transition.

Most of my interactions with crappie have been with the whites. Not in ponds, but in small lakes. For black crappie, the same, in small lakes. These waters supported good populations of crappie in the 7"-9" sizes. I just love this size crappie for fileting. I have caught thousands of them and never threw any back, LOL. Its been a few years since I have had the opportunity to fish for them but my bride really misses them and wants them in our pond.

I've read where crappie need to attain lengths of 10" to reliably spawn. I've also read where they need fish prey to be a significant part of their diet to reach lengths > 10". By the time they reach 10", the majority of the energy must come from fish prey. If abundant, they can grow at good rates of growth beyond that length. Where whites are concerned, I do know they don't have to be 10" to reliably spawn. Where such are very rare, there seemed to be no end to the spawning of WCP in the waters I fished. There were always WCP in sizes ranging from 4" to 10" where the predominant size was in the neighborhood of 8". Now all of these were stunted populations but for a fish that is stunted, an 8" WCP is mighty fine example of good eats. I have never really quite understood why anyone would disdain from harvesting WCP in this size.

One of the things mentioned above ... that is also corroborated by studies of monoculture. Neither WCP nor BCP are as prone to stunting as BG would be. So consider ponds with only BCP or WCP or at least primarily these fish. You have found they supported fish large enough to make the effort to harvest them. Sounds like you keep returning to them year after year to harvest a few messes of crappie. BG could never succeed at doing that on their own. There could be cases where BCP and WCP don't attain such lengths. This in large part depends on the biomass of their parent population when spawned. If the parental population is a major proportion of the carry capacity then their spawns will be mostly consumed by them. There isn't a lot of space for the YOY to grow into and so they grow slow and wind up on the menu ... mostly.

From time to time, I revisit the question of "What is the recipe for a successful crappie pond?" I have also visited the question, "Can WCP be successfully managed to have good balance with LMB in a two species pond?" So my interest in this last question is related to another observation that you mentioned that is also corroborated by the literature. WCP are more reliable spawners. So for and LMB/Crappie combination, wouldn't it make sense that WCP would provide more forage than BCP for LMB to eat? LMB need a good spawning fish to flourish but for fish that only spawn once a year, the biomass needs to be concentrated in fewer LMB. This allows the once a year spawn to produce the number of fish of larger average size that the bigger fewer LMB need. One the other hand, we could consider the opposite, where very few WCP/BCP grow to intermediate lengths that Big LMB need. Such a pond would contain (fewer but larger) crappie and more smaller LMB. Either is a balance that in theory could be achieved by managing the population structure.

So why don't crappie play nice with LMB? I think this is an important question where the answer probably lies with LMB recruitment. In your WCP example above, you noted large LMB in that pond when it produced better WCP and also mentioned you thought the population of large LMB were decimated by otters resulting in an overpopulation of WCP. Not saying that otters didn't do it, but I will also mention that Large LMB are susceptible to mortality due to their age. If they hadn't been replacing themselves, natural mortality may have played an important role in that pond's loss of predators. WCP have decent sized mouths (bigger than BG) and so LMB YOY would be vulnerable to predation by WCP for more extended periods of time. Competition with and predation by WCP YOY probably also play a role. WCP are more inclined to eat fish prey than BCP. So all these things considered, it is possible that LMB are prone to successive years of recruitment failure when combined with WCP. Without recruitment of LMB, WCP will eventually overpopulate without successful recruitment of LMB.

So how could one fight this dynamic as a management strategy? One possible plan is to opt for abundant LMB where the LMB are so abundant that WCP cannot attain large population numbers. Another possible plan is to plan for no LMB recruitment stocking only female LMB and supplementing the lack of recruitment with ladder stocking of female LMB (1-2 lb fish) annually. The idea here would be to have LMB spread evenly across year classes thus buffering natural mortality due to aging. If WCP are better at squashing LMB recruitment than BG, then they may even be a better candidate for the female only strategy than BG would be. Just some interesting thoughts on the matter.

In general, we are discouraged to add crappie to ponds but there probably are ways to very effectively manage them. Would be great to explore this and have some ponds dedicated to these strategies to follow here at PB.