As I try to better understand the population dynamics of/between different species, I have another little thought experiment that I'd appreciate any insight on.

Suppose we wanted to manage a pond with the goal of producing a quite high amount of decent-sized, harvestable YP for eating, without caring if we ever produced a trophy YP. How would the stocking and management strategy differ compared to someone whose principal goal is producing trophy YP?

If helpful to simplify things, you can assume we're talking about a fairly small BOW (< 1 acre), and that the owner is indifferent whether there are other species for more fun/diverse angling; though, if you have some specific thoughts on how the strategy would differ for different pond sizes or if aiming for a balance of good YP harvest and angling fun/diversity, of course that commentary is welcome.

I’ll outline my understanding so far, but please feel free to correct me or add anything as appropriate:

First, I’ll put aside interactions with other species and the YP’s feed/forage base, and for now just focus on managing YP numbers and size structure. In a pond managed for trophy YP, the population and size structure is managed to have just a small number of individuals at the largest sizes, so they have less competition so they can hopefully keep growing to even higher top-end sizes. The numbers of most all size classes would be kept light, to maintain higher growth at all ages, though numbers would be slightly higher for each progressively smaller size class to account for mortality (natural, due to predation, whatever cause) in the hopes that a small but stable number of younger/smaller YP would constantly be coming up through the ranks to replace the trophies as they die.

Now, for a pond managed to produce high numbers of nice harvestable/eating-size YP, how would the YP numbers and size structure be managed differently? I believe the main difference would be harvesting increasingly heavily as YP advanced to larger sizes, and allowing slightly higher numbers of YP at the lower size classes to hopefully come up and stably replace the medium-large YP that have been harvested heavily. E.g., harvesting most YP caught in the 8-10” range, all above 10”, and then trying to manage the smaller size populations to a reasonable number so they can replace all those harvested. I imagine this could be accomplished either through manually managing reproduction (i.e., removing most egg ribbons and leaving just a couple) or through addition of a few medium-sized predators (like SMB or WE, which would be used to control smaller YP, thus would be harvested heavily for any that got above a large enough size to eat any perch beyond 6-7”).

The YP's forage is obviously important for either goal. I'm assuming a reasonable strategy would be a strong forage base of FHM at the beginning, and then a longer-term food base of GSH, grass shrimp or crayfish, and pellet feeding. For larger numbers of smaller eating-size YP, I would think removal of most bigger GSH (maybe those above 5"?) would be a good idea as well, to not let large GSH take over a large portion of the pond's biomass/carrying capacity.

Any thoughts, comments, points of disagreement, etc. on managing this type of eating-size-YP-focused pond?