One thing that does not depend - I am not farming out my management function to an uncontrolled flock of hungry birds that eat every fish in sight.
The birds may not be under direct control, but there is certainly a limit to how much they could eat in a given period. I'm sure someone who studied cormorants could give a fair estimate.
I'm not suggesting that people go out of their way to attract cormorants, but I can see how their presence could benefit a bass-heavy pond at times. All I'm saying is that it doesn't seem logical to me that a person with too many 12" LMB gets freaked out because one cormorant is seen preying on their fish.
I always end up coming back to the same question; don't the vast majority of ponds suffer from under harvesting? And isn't it possible that many of these ponds would benefit from certain wild predators in limited quantities?
By all means you should monitor and control the number and species of wild predators, but I can't see how every wild predator is cause for great alarm.
GW - suppose your pond goals were intentionaly to be bass heavy and your intention was grow big BG, would you still want the commorants tharwting your goal by eating most of your bass? Just because one 17" LMB escaped a commorant doesn't mean that the rest of the 17"ers are safe, if I googled right they can eat fish up to 600 mm long.
Let's hope they didn't find any of my high priced SMB.
No Shorty, if I wanted to be heavy with 12" LMB I wouldn't want anyone or anything to remove them.
And, if cormorants can eat 24" LMB then I retract my comments. I would also have much more respect for cormorants in general. Now if the 24" bass weighed 2 lbs. then it might be better that it gets eaten after all.
EDIT: My conversion of fish length to 24" was based on the original figure posted of 600 mm.
