First, I must strongly recommend that if you are going to invest TIME & MONEY to adust the fish populations in your pond, start by doing & recording RWs! You will not know if the changes that you do make are having the desired effect. If I had done so, I would have saved myself a good deal of time & money.
I thought, I understood what my over LMB populated pond needed to bring things back into balance & how to do it. No LMB had been removed in 20 years the Rws were 75% & lower. Strange that my records showed that I have caught 40 LMB in the past year & I never caught a LMB smaller than 12". I have used some bait that 8-11" fish would consume. In fact the records show a slot 12-15" that the LMB were in, only a few above 15".
Reading examples of possible recruitment in a pond in another post by jpsdad, the light switch came on: I have VERY few juvenile LMB. There is no healthy bottom to the LMB pyramid size structure. There are no juvenile fish to replace the fish I have removed. Instead of 50-60 LMB to the acre I had perhaps 20 adult only. I now understand why fishing has become so unproductive.
It appears that I have probably removed enough LMB from the pond? Fish only to gain the RWs, to see if they are increasing or if there are some 8-11" LMB?
Next Spring add some LMB fingerlings? Wait till the following Spring, as the forage fish populations will have increased greatly?
Or continue as is, let the proper LMB populations recover by them selves, continue to monitor RWs?
Your comments & suggestions are greatly appreciated
