An easy indicator for the success of crappie in your pond is their size, if they are smaller then you'd like, you're not eating enough of them.
This is gospel truth from my experience with crappie(we call them white perch down here lol).
My brother lives on a sub division lake that has roughly 20 houses on it. Year one of him living there, we caught tons of crappie but they were all 6-8 inches long. I'm not sure how many other families were keeping them, but we did our part and kept about 100 fish that year. Incredible eating.
Year two, same experience...no change in lengths but once again we did our part keeping around 100 fish again. By year three we finally could see the improvement with lots of fish over 12 inches in length. We continue to keep about 100 fish a year from that body of water and the fish look so much healthier.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure we could have kept triple the fish per year and been just fine.....
