Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Fin Clipping

I’m fairly aggressive on my LMB culling. Anything 12” and smaller gets taken out. I recently read about clipping the tail fin of these size bass and leaving them in the pond for larger bass to eat. Has anyone done this? Does it seem to work? How much of the tail fin do you clip? Thanks for any insight. I’ve really enjoyed learning here.

I did it for a while. Was clipping pretty much the whole tail fin. One day I caught bass that I'd clipped a yr or 2 before. Fin was all healed up (it didn't grow back), he swam like crazy to get anywhere. We have plenty of 4-6lb bass that I'd figured would have eaten them. He was either very lucky, or the bigger bass weren't interested.

That’s pretty wild!

If I was clipping the fins of smaller LMB for food for the largest bass, I would at the start be cutting the tail completely off and at least initially cutting off one or a few of the other side &/or bottom fins so the fish really struggle to swim and become very easy to catch and eat for the big bass. I suggest that you start using the 5"-7" bass, then when it is working cut fins off larger 8"-12" LMB. The big LMB will soon learn to hang near anglers waiting for their easy meals. Bruce Condello did this in his NE quarry where he grew some huge 9 to 12 lb bass. Actually Bruce was feeding bass fillets of small bass to the big bass. Maybe someone here will post a pic of one of Bruce's hand fed whopper big bass.. This makes good use of small harvested bass. I do this with excess yellow perch for SMB meals.Big smallies now hang around waiting for the YP with missing fins.

Try it for the bass in your pond and come back here and let us know how it works for you. It will be interesting to hear how long it took for your bass learn to eat the fin cut smaller bass.

Me and my boys will start this immediately and I’ll document it well along the way. I’ll post my findings and maybe it will help some others. It does make perfect sense in theory.

Your boys should really enjoy catching smaller bass and feeding them to the big bass. It should not take more than a few days for the big bass to learn easy meals for full bellies are available.

I’ve been trying to come up with a game plan for doing this. Do you think I should always release the clipped smaller bass in the same part of the pond? I’m considering keeping them in my livewell until we are finished fishing. Then taking them out onto our dock, clipping their fins there, then dropping them directly beside the dock. My hope is the larger bass would learn that area is home to some easy meals. Thoughts???

We threw them off the dock with hopes of establishing a feeding routine. Didn’t work for us that I know of. But... we swim off the dock and don't feed pellets so there'd be no reason for them to associate the area with food to begin with.

Me and the kids have clipped around 10 cull fish the last 2 days. We clipped multiple fins so I’m certain they will be easy meals for whatever decides to eat them. My pond is being electro fished on Friday so I’m curious to see if we happen to shock any of them up. I don’t think we will. I scanned the pond closely this evening trying to spot any of the fish clipped yesterday and I couldn’t find any. They are pretty easy to spot once clipped and thrown back in. I don’t think they survived the night.

Please return to share the results of your shock survey, very few of us have the luxury of the information gathered from such a survey.

Electrofished the pond today. Took out about 30 bass 13” and under. Clipped all tails and multiple fins on each cull. On the second pass of electrofishing, one of the larger bass had already pushed one of the clipped culls into shallow water and was definitely going to eat it. My guess is none of the culls survive 24 hours. I have enough bass in the 6lb-10lb range to gobble them up. Largest fish shocked up today was 8lbs. I’m adding gizzard shad soon and will be adding trout for the second winter in a row. I’d really like to push these 7lb fish to 9-10lbs as quickly as possible.

Neat place Sam.

Thanks for the pond progress report. Future progress reports will be interesting information for readers and followers.
You can get those 7 lb bass to 9 lbs probably the end of next year. When you see your big bass eating the disabled smaller bass just be diligent to keep feeding the fins clipped off of small bass. do it at least 2-3 times per week. You can fin clip BG and feed them to some of the trained bass so they always keep growing well.