Interesting thread mtalley. Glad you started it. Unfortuantely, I don't know enough to answer your questions directly. Maybe I can give you some ideas from my own plans, because crappie will (I hope) be the feature fish in my pond some day.
I think the key to crappie is tweaking the cover. If there is too much cover, I guess too many crappie YOY will survive. Too little cover and the crappie will be predated too heavily, and so will their forage.
Forage species need to be as diverse as possible, and have sufficient cover to reproduce. Otherwise, they will most likely get wiped out.
I suppose any predator would be OK, but I think the large predators should be easy to remove. Removing or not removing the largest predators could also help maintain a workable crappie size distribution.
I have LMB, BC, BG, and RES in my pond. My forage base (in addition to fry and fingerlings)consists of endless gambusia, many crawfish, ghost shrimp, many snails, endless tadpoles, and of course insects. If small BC become too plentiful, I will remove some of the cover. If the BC become larger and on the scarce side, I will allow more cover to grow. At the moment, my BC are only 6 months old, so it will be around a year before I know if my plan is working.
Good luck with your pond!
