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.
