As you are discovering 60 acres can produce lots of fish. If the lake is not overly deep(>20ft) over much of its bottom and it is fertile with water clarity of 2ft expect there to be at around 50lb of just bullheads per acre as my best guess; 60acx50lb= 3,000lbs. If we use the average weight of 4oz (0.24 lb) for a 7.5" bullhead that equates to around 10,000 to 12,000 bullhead in your lake. Estimate could easily be more because I assumed all the bullhead were 7.5" long and we know there are probably more smaller ones than ones above 7".
IMO if you want to naturally try to increase the average size of the bullheads you should try to dramatically enhance the number of predators of bullheads in the lake. This often means more LMBass. Other predators could do the job, but LMB are prolific spawners and the bass would be the easiest way to improve predation and removal of the small bullheads. Getting a strong bass population reestablished in the lake could be difficult due to too many other fish present who will limit or prevent good survival of young bass eggs or fry. Stocked bass at whatever size, have to be able to immediately start eating abundant food to survive and then grow. Fingerling bass often fail because there is too much competition for food for fingerling bass and they starve. Consider stocking 5"-7" bass when the the schools of bullhead fry generally first appear each spring.
I suspect that the bullheads became overabundant in the lake due to a reduction of LMbass who with average densities usually provide good control of bullhead numbers. Something must have happened to the bass population to allow the bullheads to overpopulate. As a general rule the more predators that occur with a bullhead population the larger average size the bullheads become.
I assume a lake of 60 acres has a stream or watershed that provides water to the lake. If it was my lake I would seriously consider draining the lake to low pool and completely renovating it. Then the lake would refill relatively quickly. This is one of the big disadvantages of having a large body of water (BOW). They go "bad" or have problems much slower than small BOW, but when large ones do develop problems it is very expensive to get them fixed or corrected.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 12/20/17 07:52 PM.
