1) I would say both big and lmb were small and skinny.
2) I am not sure what that balance would be?
3) I’d prefer lmb trophy pond more than any then trophy bg if not a suitable pond for lmb. But if numbers of trophy fish are important to. If this pond was only capable of supporting say 10 8lb lmb vs over 100 trophy bg… I’d prefer trophy bg. Does that make sense?
😁
Cc
OK, so probably you have a fairly high population of BG relative to the BG carry capacity. This is likely due to having too much cover for the BG rather than too few LMB.
It will be easier for you to have a trophy BG BOW than a trophy LMB BOW. It is very unlikely your pond could support 10 8lb LMB even with a bunch of feeding. The pond is to shallow and too risky to attempt IMHO in your climate. A good number of trophy BG, that is doable if you can get the number of BG down. With feed you can have more of them.
4). So since I been feeding since last summer I’m gone through about 80lbs of the Game Fish Chow sold by tractor supply. High protein. But then I turned if off from say late November to March. Now that it’s back on I need to increase feeding time to at least two a day. I can let a normal feeding occur. Then throw three more handfuls and the feeding and aggression is not decreased at all. So how are you supposed to gauge how much to be feeding anyways. (There goes another answer leading to another question).
Glad you asked that question. You should be feeding the amount of feed that you pond is missing to support the weight of your goaled population of fish. Hypothetically, lets say your pond supports 80 lbs of BG and 16 lbs of LMB without feed. You could potentially have 160 BG averaging 1/2 lb and grow some of them over a 1 lb. You could do that if you could reduce the population of BG to around 160 or so BG even if you didn't feed. But lets say you feed enough to double the carry to 160 lbs of BG. With the same restricted number you could average 3/4 to 1 lb and possibly grow some examples to 2 lbs. Or you could have twice as many averaging 1/2 lbs and with twice as many reaching 1 lbs. There are all kinds of ways to divey the carry capacity ... but to get what you want ... you have to effectively control populations to meet that goal.
