I have a 1.5 acre pond in South Central Minnesota, stocked with LMB and BG. It's ten years old and doing fine - many thanks to advice I got from the Pond Boss forums, although I need to do some corrective harvesting to bring my populations back in check. The LMB are 12-14 inches and somewhat underweight. There is riprap around half of this pond and some block structure on the bottom (I do need to add to this).
There is a new 1/8 acre pond next to it (not connected) that was dug last fall. My grand scheme is to use that for new forage with FHM. 25 lbs of minnows were added last week. I'm thinking I'd like to also add Virile Crayfish to that small pond for more forage (and the occasional crawfish boil). The plant life in the new pond isn't well-established yet, but in the short term I was thinking that the fish I remove from the big pond can be gutted and thrown in the new pond for the crayfish. I was also thinking that the crayfish that get antsy and walk the 20 feet over to the big pond would be easy pickins for the LMB.
I've picked through the threads I could find about crayfish, and they make me fairly confident that my little scheme "should" work. BUT!
Can anybody poke holes in my plans? Will I have problems with crayfish reproduction rates? Will they tear up my shoreline? Are my LMB big enough to eat them and keep their population in check?
Thanks a bunch to all!
