Originally Posted By: esshup
My swag would be to add the crawfish to help the fish grow faster. I don't think that they will take away from your Sunfish predation issue. If the predatory fish are not growing that fast (hood RW) then I don't think having more food for them will be bad - including YOY sunfish.

Look at it from an engineering/math standpoint. How many predators do you have in there? How much weight do you expect them to put on this coming year? How many pounds of YOY fish will that take? Will there be enough YOY fish??

There obviously wasn't enough for them in 2015.

Once you do that drill, then make a decision on the crawfish.


I like the math approach.

Using the numbers for desired yearly growth of 1 pound growth for SMB and LMB, 6 oz growth for YP and 8 oz for WE and assuming 8 pounds of forage per pound of growth, I need 450 pounds of YOY SF. I don't know if these number assumptions are realistic so if somebody has better ones I would like to hear them.

If the numbers are close, I am way short on forage, especially since a very large percentage of my YOY are consumed by YP when they are around the 1 inch size, or smaller, so they don't weigh very much! Even if the PS spawn, it won't help that much. I will definitely stock the craws. I'm also hoping to get some other forage going like, scuds, grass shrimp and a hearty minnow species.

What do you guys think about this idea? My BG population seems to be heavily skewed towards males. I say this because a good 80% of the nests built during spawn end up uninhabited. How about I stock a few adult female BG (maybe 5 to 10)?

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