Yesturday I slopped in the mud and got the last catfish out of my pond and here's what I found.
Let me backtrack a little bit with some info.
Half acre pond that in about 2000 put some bass channel catfish, three or four yellowcat, a few crappie, a few sand bass and two blues. It was my dump for fish from ponds going dry and fish that I didn't want to clean. Later I put in about a 1000 small bluegill.
It never was a balanced fishery but I pulled out a huge sandbass, a few hybrid stripers (6lb), six bass (2-6lbs) two blues (7 and 8 lbs), 50 or 60 channels (1-9 lbs) and three yellowcat.
The yellow cats were put in at the same time at close to the same size. One was a whopping 18and1/4 lbs, one 12lbs and the other was only 4lbs. I don't know why the one was so much smaller than the other two.
As guessed there were lots of small crappie and bluegill with very few intermediate sized anything. Last summer I seined about 20 crapppie just big enough to eat. I know I have seined a few bluegill bigger than four inches in the last few years but now there were none.
I think the hardest part to raising large yellowcat is raising large forage fish.
