OK, Great. So the first thing is that it seems the fish have been moving around a lot and fishing other parts of your BOW resulted in no reduction of recapture per sample size compared to yesterdays survey. This seems to suggest that your 2nd survey was not geospatially biased. So yesterday, you had 7 recaptures from survey 1 out of 61 fish caught. Today you had 8 recaptures from survey 1 out 47 fish. I did not count recaps from yesterdays marking because I am going to treat todays survey as an extension of yesterdays 2nd survey (and we don't want to count the fish of the 2nd survey twice). So between today and yesterday, you caught a total of 108 fish with 15 recaptures from the first survey. It may be possible, that 1 or more of the recaps that we are counting today were also caught yesterday. If this be the case, then we are counting 1 or more recaptures twice. If this happened, this would scew the population estimate down. Since the fish are not uniquely identified (where we could be certain), we can't know for certain whether any recaps today were also counted yesterday. In any event, combining the two days as the second survey, we get an estimate 497 adult panfish (680/acre) compared to 601 adult panfish (823/acre) from yesterday's survey data. To be safe, (considering we don't know if any of todays recaps were caught today), we could take an average of the two and go with 549 adult panfish (752 /acre). That equates to around 137 lbs of adult panfish/acre (tentatively based on the average weights of survey 1). To be sure, I "feel" like you should have more standing than that but lets not argue with the data. Let's work with the average number.
Presently, if you marked the 39 new fish today, you have (69+55+39) 163 unique fish marked. That would be 223 adult panfish per acre that are marked. Of those 163 marked fish, 35 of them are GSF and so you have 128 marked fish that are either YP or PKS (your preferred species). The marked preferred species per acre is 175 per acre. If you removed all GSF AND unmarked preferred panfish until the look back of 100 catches were only 50% unmarked fish, then you would have in the neighborhood of 350 adult preferred panfish per acre. This is plenty, especially if your standing weight is presently only around 137 lbs/acre (though I may adjust this number after thorough review of the totality of the data you've collected). So let's stop marking fish and start removing any and all GSF plus lets also remove unmarked PKS and YP until the look back of 50 catches for each species is only 50% unmarked fish. If this happens with YP first, stop removing YP and continue removing unmarked PKS until the 50 catch look back is 50% unmarked PKS. This action has the potential of adding and average .15 lbs per adult fish on average which is close to a doubling of weight. This assumes the population numbers have low uncertainty and that fish less than adult sizes are not very numerous (which have up now been not numerous in your surveys). Start culling now and try to reach the look back before ice up. Continue after ice out if you didn't reach the look back. You will be keeping a record of all fish caught, marked fish which are returned as well as the culled unmarked fish. If the population estimate from your surveys are close to the actual values, then you should expect to reach the look back goals after removing ~ 400 fish. If it takes substantially more fish removal than this, then we underestimated your population and standing weight. I don't think it will take much less, but if it does, then we may have overestimated your population. However, it works out, we are going to use the feedback of your ongoing culling efforts to improve our understanding of your BOW's carry. Improving our understanding of your carry, is I think, necessary to making a better supplemental stocking of predators. Let's get more data before making a recommendation for the LMB. There is enough time between now and when you need to stock them next spring to make a lot of progress on your panfish look back goals.
I will analyze all your data collected thus far in greater detail and share any additional inferences or adjustments as required after I have concluded that analysis.
