Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Electroshocking vs nets

There was a lake near my house that was recently sampled for bass. It was only electroshocked, no deepwater nets or traps.

http://www.townoflakelure.com/Documents/LakeLure2011FishStudy.pdf

My question is on small lakes or ponds, does just electroshocking give you a good sample of the largemouth and smallmouth bass populations?

Thats a great question. The reason that only EF was used to sample LMB, was mainly due to how a LMB behaves. A LMB is a smart, and strictly a sight (great eyesight) predator, and is very hard to get into any sort of net such as gill nets, trap nets, hoop nets, etc. In all of the net sampling I have done with my profession, I can only remember once, maybe twice that we caught a bass in any sort of net. Long story short, its just not efficient.
As a biologist here in Mississippi, we EF our lakes in the fall, as we know we will have the best chance for a representative sample for bream and bass in the fall, as the fish will start to move into the shallows, thus there really isn't any need for any deep water sampling, especially for LMB.

Good answer, tyler!! :-)

In small lakes and ponds, angling using various techniques and keeping good catch records is a pretty good way to monitor the LMB populations. Seining the shallows works pretty good to monitor the YOY numbers when the bass are less than 4".

I learned from the best Dr. Willis!

OK what about for smallmouth bass?

Gambusia, If done the right time of the year the EF should work as good as any other method to capture them. In an ideal world we could flip a switch and inventory all your fish. It does not work that way. I think you received the best collection method possible. The report was well written as well as from a company with a great reputation.

If you want more info on smallmouth you can fish for them and run some of the Wr data yourself to increase that sample size and for different times of the year track their growth. Also consider tagging some fo the bass with individual numbered tags. This for sure would add to the big picture of "how are our smallies doing".