I'll hit this one from a different angle. The original question was, Can you have too much forage fish?
My answer is....no.
If you do, it's a temporary phenomenon, based on how the question was couched. The key point conveyed in the question here is "...right percentage of bass..." Here's an important point to keep in mind. Remember that it takes about ten pounds of forage to yield a pound of gain at each trophic level of the food chain. So, if you have a ten acre lake and have managed to add an extra thousand pounds of forage, you grow 100 pounds of predator fish, or 10 pounds per acre. Understanding that, there's really not much way to truly be "forage heavy" for very long at all.
When the restaurant is open, the bass will eat. There are cases where certain species of forage can become abundant in specific situations. That's a big reason we won't stock gizzard shad into a lake where we're not confident there are enough big mouths to eat significant numbers of shad as their growth rates push beyond 7-9", which happens within about 90 days of hatching. In that case, shad can outgrow the predator mouth-size, if we don't have enough large bass to prevent that situation.
Another unique situation I'll always remember was Bruce Condello's pond in Nebraska where he was stocking his best males, with no other fish. (except a few leftover hybrid striped bass). I took my 100 foot, 10' deep seine there one time, and we seined a neck of his three acre pond. We caught one hybrid striper and 40-50 big bluegills, and tens of thousands of large insect larvae and nymphs. That pond was teeming with every bug you could imagine, because there wasn't a slot in the food chain which could eat them. Sure, the bluegill could eat some, but weren't in large enough numbers to be significant for harvest. That was a cool study.
Regarding money spent, think about what it costs to buy a new bass boat, outfit it, buy all the stuff, and go to a public lake. And, you can't pull a new bass boat with a worn out truck. Add a new pickup truck to the mix and you have a lot of money in stuff that depreciates the minute you drive off the lot. Throw in bait, fuel, snacks and time going to and from that lake, and those crawfish, trout, bluegill, hatchery ponds and those dollars don't seem as bad.
Last edited by Bob Lusk; 01/31/17 05:49 PM.
