I think that lake doc sees the BG shape as a plus.
I am studying Biology at UMD and am looking at going into fisheries managment.
The BG/SMB problem is all about the size structure of your two populations. If SMB eat enough BG under 4" then every BG that reaches 4" is guranteed to grow to 8"+. But if BG reproduction outpaces SMB predation too much then you will have stunting in the 4" size class. All you need to do is watch the size of the 4" BG and or the number of 5"-6" BG. If you see few or no 5"+ fish you know that BG competition is too high and you are not getting any BG growth. How to solve that problem is the tricky part.
If SMB are present they should mop up on the smaller BG, and severly reduce the life expentancy of the BG, since a BG's best defence is being too big to eat. If SMB size and numbers are also dropping you have bigger problems. One thing I thought of was excesive we cover. SMB are not designed to hunt in the weeds that BG favor, a few grass carp could do wonders to increase SMB predation and therefore size.
