Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations overcrowding verdict?

This viever video gives a glimse of what pike is capable of.
Greed for game fish, and no fear for people.
http://www.nrk.no/nett-tv/klipp/309424
This top predator I wouldn't want in the pond, my opinion

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Its a mesage telling you need a broadband of minimum 375 kbit/s
you cam manualy try to change your speed

I don't think I know how to do that, but I want to see that video.

That pike really wanted that fish!!!

Found it on
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EHkNXhwQxk
ØRETTEN OG GJEDDA
means THE TROUT AND THE PIKE

Thanks ande! That was wild!

Wow, crazy stuff!

I remember when I was a kid, while running set lines with my Grandpa on the Missouri River by Niobrara, Nebraska, we had a pike encounter. We were using 4-5 inch green sunfish for bait. A 4 pound pike had eaten the sunfish and then an 18 pound pike had bitten the smaller pike, hooking itself in the process. Unfortunately, we didn't have a camera to take pictures.

A second pike encounter occurred on a canoe/camping/fishing trip to Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario. I had hooked and was in the process of reeling in a 3 pound small mouth bass. I had just brought the fish within about ten feet of the boat when this 40+ inch northern pike comes from nowhere and snatches the bass. I fought them both for about five minutes before the pike finally let go. It was crazy stuff.

I would love to put four or five pike in my 2 acre pond, but I am afraid they would decimate my other fish.

ahhh....quetico....even a SC boy like myself can tell stories about that place. just took my dad back up there for the first time in 24 years for his 70th birthday. Saw our paddle from 1985 on the wall at Canoe Canada and went smallmouth fishing for 5 days. That place is heaven on earth.

sorry to hijack the thread. Nostalgia overtook me.

Ok, i get more and more into the wealth of info on this forum on every lunch break and usually find some great info to email my dad about his lake. Got into a train of threads off of the crappie question that is currently active, and stumbled across this post:

So how is this done? Like i said, the ice fishing revealed a bunch of fat bass along with the skinny ones, so things seem to be improving. How can i tell this in the future when i angle there. Please remember this has to be told in a way that I (not the brightest crayon) can understand and then communicate to Pops.

The best way to tell is to slaughter the fish and look at it's otolith. It will have rings like a tree to identify it's age. OK, that's too durn much trouble.

So, take a look at the relation of it's head to body condition. If the head looks kinda out of place for the body, it's an older skinny bass that has had or is having a tough time getting enough to eat. You'll have to look at some of them but it will begin to get pretty obvious to you.

so freaky looking big head on a skinny bass is a bad thing. Check. Big belly average head good thing. Understood.

Thanks, Dave! (and vicariously Bruce) much appreciated.

how about an easy way to identify if there are crayfish in the lake without crayfish stacks on the shore? people there have heavily manicured lawns and landscape companies. No way that there would be a stack on someone's property. There is a wetlands conservation area (huge for around there, like 50 acres), as well as morraine hills state park just beyond their lake community, though, and I am almost certain they are there. These places are the source of the plentiful chorus frogs & bullfrogs.

Dad is asking if stocking crayfish would provide a good forage base for the bass, enough for a few of them to grow to size and help manage the pond themselves. You guys rocked the good infor on tiger muskie, what's the ruling here?

I ask how can i tell if they are around because i don't want to put them in the lake if there is a reason they aren't there to begin with (like bad water for crayfish, the wrong chemicals present, or some other problem that would stop this from being a good investment).

Most crayfish species require rocky habitat to do well... Some species can/prefer to utilize leafy detritus but the vast majority prefer rocks. Two methods I would say to see if you have native crayfish in your lake is to walk the shoreline at night with a spotlight. If there are crayfish in any kind of numbers, you'll see some walking the shallows. You can also purchase a crayfish trap and bait it with something stink nasty. If there are crayfish present, you should be able to capture a few...

A word of caution, if you decide to stock crayfish be VERY careful. Some species are beneficial, others can become a real nuisance or worse! Many hatcheries sell crayfish, getting them to actually tell you what species they are selling you is a challenge. Making sure their crayfish aren't contaminated with unwanted species can be even more challenging.

Some species of crayfish are burrowers, others are not... I would try to get a species that doesn't burrow. This is especially important for ponds that are formed by dams as the crayfish can cause bad seepage or cause failure. Some species are nasty on aquatic vegetation, so much so that they can completely denude a pond of it. So depending on your desire for aquatic vegetation in your lake, be forewarned. Some species are very aggressive and will dominate and out compete other species.

Crayfish do provide a good forage base for bass. They can be a very important part of the forage food chain. I think they are much more important for growing quality SMB, but LMB certainly love them as well.

Here are a couple of good threads on crawfish. But start with the archive which has more.

Archive
http://www.pondboss.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=119724#Post119724

http://www.pondboss.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=25641&fpart=1

http://www.pondboss.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=110189&fpart=1

And from Theo :

Major PB Crawdad thread: Crawfish for LMB forage

Northern Crawfish info: Seagrant link

Rusty Crayfish info and identification: rusty crayfish invader

Thanks guys...now i just have to find a crayfish and dig through the fridge for something stink nasty.

Much appreciated.

skinnybass, beef liver has worked great for me when trapping fish or crayfish.

rock on, thanks, i'll try that.

I have actually seen a Tiger Musky try and take down a Loon 3 times. Pike and Musky are eating machines. I have also seen first hand a large Pike try and eat about a 2 to 3 pounds bass as they swam around like crazy in the shore bass in abolute fear for his life!! He did get away only because we got in the middle of it trying to catch the pike!! Put a couple in your pond and you will no loger have an overstocking problem before to long that's for sure!!

Yeah, somebody dropped a 30"+ one-eyed monster pike in there a few years back. the mythical lake beast Onezey.
This year ice fishing we ended up with the fattest bass we've seen (still too many of the tiny, emaciated looking ones with the huge heads and tiny bodies, like skeletor bass....thanks to the above poster for informing me that this is characteristic of an older fish with not enough to eat), and even a bunch of baby pike (all under 21").
In my uneducated opinion, there have always been pike in the pond, just kept down by bass predation, and with a little pressure off, we saw some growing past the minnow size.
The crappie & BG are still HUGE, but a few smaller ones were present as well (but this might just be seasonal, like with the pressure off as the bass feed slower, the tiny BG got a little bit of life without the ever-present impending doom by bass).

The plan, as it stands, is to improve forage cover with artificial structures and remove the Skeletors. the crayfish is another idea for a larger forage that can fatten up the bass a lil.

Of course, i invite anyone again to throw down your opinions and advice. I think tiger muskie are officially out as an option, as is spending any large amount of cash, the HOA just won't throw the cash around.

I second the beef liver. Works great.

Hello all:
Again, thanks for all of your help with my dad's bow. Last weekend of ice (they hope) and there apparently was an ice-fishing bonanza, i didn't get to make it up there, but they had a huge weekend.Onezey, the mythical lake beast, was caught by 2 people on a total of 3 seperate occasions.

There were also a bunch of those smaller pike caught. Unfortunately for me, and for all of you whom i'm now pestering with the questions, Mr Chairman of the Lake Committee was the one hosting the bonanza, and apparently he is flipping his lid very concerned.

There are a few questions at this point. So there have been a total of 12 mini-pike caught and confirmed, but sizes recorded only make for 6 different lengths, so only really 6 confirmed mini-pike, all between 12-21".

Other species caught were the usual suspects, skinny bass (24 more removed from the lake, if my dad told me right), black crappie, bluegill. Nobody pulled in one of the walleye this weekend.

So dad asked me a bunch of questions to ask you guys..i told him he should just sign on, but i don't think he's too into forums...whatever.

a) Lake committee chair was very nihisitic about it, saying it's all over, we now jsut have a pike lake, all the bass are dead. What is a good response to this? How accurate is this? He's a pretty smart guy, from what i understand, but it seems like an alarmist approach to me (although to begin with this was my response, as you all may remember, but Walt was good enought to convince me otherwise, and the rest of you have done your parts as well).

b) is removing bass still a good answer? Or will the pike start to mediate this on their own? I guess yes, still remove slot bass...

c) In the post below i'll be putting some images down. One of which is the map of depths we've been putting together, the colors don't mean as much, just the depths in text. Just southeast of dad's pier is a culvert that functions as the drain from the street into the lake. Dad wants to put some emergent grasses there, that he thinks and i agree will double as cover for forage as well as a very sightly cover for yet ineffective filter for road-grime and other nastiness that makes its way into the lake. what is a good species of grass to plant there that will survive the mean chicago winters and be easy enough for him to maintain (ie not cover his shoreline in a year or so...)?

d) based on the map, where would be good places for cover? In front of dad's pier where it first drops to 12' will be one set, i'm sure. Where else?

e) dad likes the hone-hole style of cover, with soft polyeurethane tubing (no hazard to people diving off of the trampolines etc...as opposed to rigid pvc, no skewering of swimmers, etc). What kind of tubing should he invest in for the construction of these things that will still remain erect for years?

f) in the summer we'll be putting in minnow traps and craw traps, but just to point us in the right direction before we can ID any forage species, what kinds of additional forage should we be looking at?

Thanks all! Photos coming soon!
-Skinny

my buddy nate with a crappie
nate with a mini-pike, 15"
Chris with a skinny bass
The standard gill..really small actually, dwarfish in comparison to the others
A neighbor with Onezey the mythical lake beast. That's the good eye. He seems much skinnier than he did in the summertime photo i saw.
That's my smiling mug.
Nate lost a rod to a bass. That's him and chris, having just fished the rod back out of the lake, using the retrieved rod to pull in the bass. see the trail of holes the drilled chasing it across the lake? Using the aquaview, they eventually snagged it, and brought the fish in. It's the skinny bass with chris posted above. Lol. Good times.
a shoddy topo map.

Just got another question....
When are the respective breeding times for all the big players in the lake? I know that it all hinges on water temp, but just a guestimate on what to expect?
from the species i hit when i fish down here in southern illinois, i suspect it goes in this order:
-crappie/bg
-largemouth
-pike

Does that even make sense? somebody please correct me.