Shorty,
It's very well possible that we do have a couple bigger LMB lurking somewhere in the deep. My sampling methods may be lacking, but via trapping I can catch hundreds of BG from 1-3" close to the shore, and just visually now that the water's clearer I can see good numbers of what I'd guess to be 4-5" BG out a little further from shore. I've thrown in 5" chunks of nightcrawler on the medium sized hooks I use to catch bass and larger BG and can watch good numbers of little 4-5" BG attacking the bait, though they obviously can't swallow that large of bait or hook. We did catch some BG in the 7-8" range, I'd guess maybe 10-15% of those harvested. I'm not sure about the range around 6" though.

It just puzzles me that if the pond really was bass overcrowded (as evidenced by them most all being extremely skinny, and us only ever seeing/catching a couple bass over 13" in the past decade, and the BG growing to nice sizes), why are there so many BG juveniles this year (I don't think we had so many in recent years)? We've only harvested 56 LMB/acre, and now the BG juveniles are venturing out 20' from shore into open water whereas they always used to stay tight to the bank and cover due to predatory pressure. It also appears that the LMB haven't spawned well in recent years, as we never see any YoY bass, we never see the bass making or guarding nests, both of which we always used to see every year earlier in the life of the pond. The males we harvested were especially skinny, so all this makes me wonder if the LMB population could truly be skewed that heavily towards females. I'm trying to make theories to rationalize this; for example, is it possible that in the last couple years, the LMB being very overcrowded and super skinny, that many of those adult males actually died after the spawn due to being really skinny to start with and then not eating, guarding nests, and general spawn stress? And then this year, are we just starting to see the effects of them dying, that being the little BG population rebounding? Another potential factor is that these bass were stocked 20 years ago and no new genetics have been introduced since then, so could there be some inbreeding or stale genetics issues affecting their ability to spawn?

Last edited by Drew Snyder; 05/22/19 06:43 AM.