Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Fertilization Small Bass, Clear Water & Weeds

Welcome to the forum.

Larger LMB?

1. Have fewer of them for the existing food supply (ie remove lots and lots of stunted bass).

2. Increase the food supply. Start a feeding program for the forage fish. Provide cover for the existing forage fish fry to be able to hide from predators to get to a better size to provide more food. In other words, do things to increase the forage base food supply for the bass.

3. Did I mention remove lots and lots of stunted bass? As long as there are too many bass, your forage base (bass food supply) is going to get slaughtered before it can reach any decent size to provide food for any larger bass.

In a 2.5 acre pond, that is going to require a lot of work to remove any significant amount of bass. In fact it may be a hopeless cause because the bass may recruit new bass faster than you can remove them. In which case you kill the pond out, restock, and start over.

A pond only has so much carrying capacity. In an aquarium you could have one big fish or 10 small ones. But you can't just keep adding fish. Your pond is likely at carrying capacity. To get bigger fish will require a lot of smaller fish removed (either eaten by bigger fish or entirely removed) to make room. Maybe adding a large predator to eat a lot of the small bass????

If you have money it is helpful. Then you could use a shock boat and have tons of small bass removed rather quickly.

Those are just ideas in my non expert limited knowledge opinion. Now the experts can really tell you what to do.