All the fyke nets I found for sale online were not too huge, usually 3' X 4'. I will readily admit I'm wrong if shown data of an instance in which such a net was successfully used to reclaim a pond overrun with crappie, but I just can't imagine it would be possible. One good crappie spawn can produce tiny crappie so numerous that there are literally tens of thousands of them in the pond; witness the thread on here somewhere referencing a pond Bob Lusk worked on that had "tons" of 4" crappie that were seven years old. Probably that pond was bigger than the one being discussed in this thread, but my point is, even a quarter ton of 4" crappie is an awful lot of crappie, and would take an awful lot of passes with a 3'X4' net to harvest. And that's also assuming that all or most of the crappie agree to swim right into the net, which I don't think could be assumed.
One other point: if Basf harvests enough LMB to provide better growth for the remaining bass, and doesn't at the same time stock some other predator, he's one good crappie spawn away from having a pond full of 4" crappie, and it's a matter of when and not if. Whereas if he stocks an esocid to thin the bass, they'll do so while at the same time keeping the crappie from overpopulating, for the dual reasons that they are cooler-water fish than the bass and will feed on crappie better at the time of the spawn, and they can eat larger crappie than the bass can.
If he has 100 pounds of predators right now (and it's not at all an inescapable law of nature that that exact poundage occurs per acre every time), probably it consists of well over a hundred bass that average under a pound each. If he had forty pounds of his alloted predator quotient taken up by tiger muskie, I'd wager a lot of money that the other sixty pounds would consist of LMB that averaged two pounds or better, with several specimens going from three to six pounds, and a couple in the eight- to ten-pound range. I personally would rather catch one six-pound bass than a hundred pounders. But that's just me.
