OK. So don't know much about RES other than they show up from time to time in my creel. To be sure, they are welcome. I like the shape of their bodies and the ease of fileting them. Reminds me a lot of crappie in that regard. In the waters I fish, the RES seems to be far less dominant a species than BG. I say seems, in that I can't drain the ponds and quantify each. I suppose it could be there are more RES than BG by weight if I could just get my bait to them without the BG interfering. Much of the literature seems to imply that RES cannot attain as high a standing weight as can BG although I can't seem to find any controlled experiments verifying this.
To their credit many studies report that RES have a high proportion of harvestable fish in mature bows. This
www.ojs.library.okstate.edu › osu › index.php › OAS › article › download found that 52% of redear sunfish were of harvestable size in 42 Oklahoma ponds that were drained to determine standing weights. Harvestable was defined by panfish that are a minimum of .1 lbs (> 5.5 " for redear). They found that where RES occurred ... their standing weight averaged 44 lbs/ac with a maximum of 160 lbs/ac. Big range. All in all, these measurements reflect what I had already inferred from other sources. Specifically, that RES tend not to overpopulate, grow faster than other lepomis, and comprise a small percentage of the total standing weight (in the paper above that number was 12%).
Now fast forward. I came across this little gem of a
web document co-authored by our late great Dave Willis. In it they mention Don Gabelhouse's masters thesis where he sampled 4 small bows ranging from 0.1 to 0.4 acres. I found Don's findings rather remarkable. In these bows, RES comprised the majority of the biomass. The redear co-existed with GSF in one bow and with BG in another but even in these two cases the redear dominated the biomass. Also of interest is the standing weights of the redear which ranged from 232 to 356 lbs/ac. Maybe I'm just exaggerating the significance of this but I find this quite remarkable. I do wonder how this situation may have happened but one idea that happened to occur to me is that all 4 ponds may have been owned by a single landowner who stocked them originally with only RES and LMB.
To be sure, Dave's article deals with RES in combination with SMB and I understand the reasoning and wisdom of this combination. Even so, when an average standing weight of LMB @ 58 lbs/ac and average standing weight of RES @ 298 lbs/ac is considered, I can't help but wonder what could possibly be wrong with that. Yes, the LMB were probably stunting and couldn't achieve large individual weights. But I have also seen that with BG and LMB ... particularly in aged ponds. For folks who like panfish, like myself, the large population of small bass is a means to the end of healthy harvestable panfish.
So what are your thoughts, are Don's observations in those 4 bows sustainable over the long run? Will LMB reproduce enough to hold the RES in check ... will the RES reproduce enough to replace themselves under harvest? If LMB are a no go could spotted bass be a substitute predator more like SMB?
