What would be a good expectation of 1st year survival of BD's original 50 LMB?
I hadn't seen an answer to this pop up and personally don't know the aurthor. I have read on the site that he was a very good guy and well thought of however. From what I saw from Dr Willis listed 30%.
Take a look at the charts. Let's assume that you have a largemouth bass population in a South Dakota pond that experiences 30% total annual mortality (top figure). That means 30% will die each year regardless of whether they are harvested or not. If you start with 100 largemouth bass at age 1, by the time they reach age 5 there will only be 24 left. In contrast, let's say you have 100 age-1 black crappies in a southern U.S. reservoir. They have a total annual mortality rate of 70%. In this case, you should expect only 1 of those 100 crappies to still be alive at age 5. See the huge effect that different mortality rates have on those two different populations?
Sounds like species and region also play into this. Like almost everything else in this game of ours trying to manage the water and the fish.....nothing is certain.
If the 30% number turns out to be correct - my 50 LMB would be 35 next year at 1 year. If I was able to pull another 10 in the way of males or lowest performing fish I'd be down to 25 in the 1.5 acres. With short numbers of fish like that I would hope that forage options for them would be high and RW's continue to be maximized. Each LMB spawn does require us to harvest smaller fish along with additional males anytime we can identify them.
1.5acre LMB, YP, BG, RES, GSH, Seasonal Tilapia I subscribe to Pond Boss Magazine
