Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain ok to add adult LMB to an existing pond?

I think I know the answer but have to ask anyway. My pond is 2 acres only stocked less than a year with LMB, BG, RES, MF. The BG are a mix of 1-3” and adults, they are doing very well with feeding. I have GS and TFS coming soon. I have access to adult LMB from where i work, I am culling relative weights between 90 and 105 to hit the goal of 200lbs removed. Will there ever be a time where it is ok to add a few of these adult LMB or do i just have to be patient and let the plan play out?

What is the goal of your pond?

The biggest MFs I've ever had in my ponds were very large Grass Carp.

CCp - It appears to me your pond is still in the stage of new fishery. Remind us of your goals of your fishery community.

If you are currently removing LMB to the goal of 200lb for 2026,,, why would want to add more adult LMB from another pond ecosystem?? Is it just to have some big bass? Adult fish in each unique fishery are and have "adapted" or accustomed to thriving and hopefully growing well in that specific relationship of prey - predator density. When those adult fish are removed and dumped into another balance of prey / predator the new fish have undergone undue stressors and then have to find a way to adjust to a different forage food balance. Remember the 'dumped' fish have been stressed of capture, transport, and release. The dumped fish also have to stay healthy in a new different water chemical, fungal and parasite balance as every pond has them and is different, sometimes quite different with having UNSEEN conditions of not being apparent. A few individual stressed and lucky fish will tolerate transfer better than MOST of the others when in the new competitive environment with different habitat conditions and community competition interactions. It is natural variability for the make-up of all species - survival of the fittest. Only the strongest and adaptable survive.

IMO the fish grown in your existing fishery will always thrive and grow better than any newly introduced adult fish. Your job as fishery manager is to closely monitor and do whatever is possible to maintain an abundant or over abundant forage food supply in the existing fishery for each of the intended goal/s. For growing LMB one cannot have too many proper forage foods if bass growth is a desired key component. One common sense way to do this is to monitor and keep the number of "hogs" at low density so the forage food community is ALWAYS thriving and is able to maintain itself as an abundant supply of food items. This keeps the higher level consumers growing the best they can grow. Annual growth rate always slows and can even stop when foods become limiting.

Know what the best growth rates are for each desired fish specie in your pond. When your chosen or targeted fish are not at those optimum growth rates you are NOT doing something correctly for growing those fish.

I’m sorry I was not clear on what I have and my goals. My pond is new, the ponds where i work are well established and in need of substantial culling of bass. We had a stunted LMB population 4 yrs ago so we pulled roughly 2000 lbs of LMB out, added multiple feeders and TFS. The BG, RES and TFS where i work are all thriving so the LMB are also growing very well. My thought was to move some of the larger culls from my work to my home pond at some point to have some larger fish for my friends and grandkids to catch before 2 years goes by. My goals for my home pond are high catch rate LMB with a few big girls in there to keep it interesting. The goals for my work ponds are one to be trophy LMB and the other high catch rate LMB. If the TFS survive in my pond would adding F1 tigers make sense to grow the bass faster?
Hey Theo I meant gambusia but thanks for the laugh.

I'd be inclined to not add larger bass unless you stocked too many small ones and need to reduce there number along with anything else that will fit in their mouths. I initially overstocked my pond because I went with the recommendation of the fish farm. A fish kill allowed me a second chance. I am a fan of minimum stocking to get the species established and ample harvest to keep them healthy. Bill has been a great resource for me and I have the results I want; all fish are fat across all size classes. We harvest 60 big bg and ten eating size (12-14") lmb per year in in our one acre lmb and bg pond. Our yp and smb pond is also doing well. Good luck!😂

What size are the forage fish for the LMB in your pond and what size would the LMB be that you are stocking? O/K I re-read your OP. 1"-3" BG will effectively feed 3"-12" LMB. A 3" LMB will also feed a 12" LMB. If you want the bass to grow fast in your pond, stock 100 total LMB for that 2 acres. That is at a BG/LMB ratio of 30/1. Your LMB growth rate will be governed by not only the available pounds of forage fish in your pond, but also by the size of those forage fish. A LMB really needs forage fish in the 25% to 33% size of it's length for optimal growth. I can get LMB to go from 2"-3" in late May to 14"-16" in late September by having enough forage fish of the correct size in the pond, AND the correct ratio to ensure that the LMB don't run out of fish to eat.

What size again were the LMB that you stocked, what size are the LMB that you want to stock and how many LMB did you originally stock? If you want to add F1 Tiger Bass, go ahead. BUT for every one you add you have to remove an existing fish of the same size or you are fooling yourself thinking that adding more LMB will make them grow faster.

The larger the LMB are that you add, the harder it will be for them to acclimate to the new pond environment and the harder it will be to keep them growing well. The only exception to that might be LMB that are pellet trained and you are feeding the LMB in your pond too. I'd make sure who I bought them from knew want time of day they were fed and what food they were fed including pellet size, so you can duplicate that until they are feeding well, then you can slowly adjust the time of feeding if you need to.

If you have to many 3-4 inch BG and 6-8 inch LMB then you could add a couple of 3-4lb LMB to help reduce the numbers. That assumes you have no larger LMB there already. As a general rule fish that grow up in a location do better than those added as adults. I would want to be sure what is there (current population analysis) before I add more fish.

I wouldn't add any stunted LMB as it limits top end growth.

Said another way - stunting limits how big or what size they will eventually grow to due to the amount of growth loss for each year they endured stunting. How many years were stunted or lacking enough food to grow and just survive? That factor is a big unknown when dealing with or restocking stunted fish.

I’ve got a lot of 2” -10”BG, not sure how many 3”-5” LMB survived the original stocking of 200 after fish kill. There are mosquito fish already there and GS and FHM on the way. The LMB I have access to from work are all size classes and I can choose which ones i bring home based on relative weights up to about 3 lbs( I wouldn’t take anything larger than 3 lbs ). I was thinking about bringing in F1s to my pond to be able to diversify genetics and take some back to my work ponds to do the same. Any thoughts on that plan?
These are not the stunted LMB, those were taken out of the ponds completely in the past few years and we only keep LMB with relative weights over 100 for any size class.

I would only add adult largemouth bass if my predator/prey ratio was out of whack in favor of the prey. (which is rare from what I've seen)

The management practices I've read online say 10:1 but personally I'd rather have 50:1 because my desire is for the bass to be absolutely surrounded by easy meals!!

Are you wanting new genetics? If so you could get a couple of female 3 lb Florida LMB to add and make your own F-1s. Just remove a few additional LMB to make room. First be sure there is enough food for any add ons.

The best reason I can think of to add adult LMB is when they do not recruit sufficiently to replace themselves. Examples, Female only initial stockings or where culling has reduced the male populations sufficiently to inhibit successful recruitment of LMB. Water with high populations of forage in consumable sizes and with few adult male LMB would be candidates for supplementation of female LMB. The supplementation rate would depend on whether one wants to catch and release to end of life or to harvest a limited number of trophies annually. Ideally, one wants the population of adult LMB to be relatively stable over time where mortality equals recruitment. The benefit of annual recruitment of LMB is to spread the population across multiple year classes where each class can grow at satiation rates of growth. This also spreads the demand for optimal sized forage across a wider range of sizes.

Just a thought. When there is plenty of forage to go around and when LMB are sufficiently limited in number (making satiation weight increments), the conditions calling for the need of supplementation of recruits are more likely. Where annual weight increments are below potential, there is alternatively a need to cull the population of existing adults.

On the ratio of consumable forage to LMB. This is a number I would love to understand better. Particularly, how numerous do prey of various relative prey sizes have to be if the LMB are to feed at satiation. For each relative size of prey, there must be a limiting density ... below which ... LMB do not feed as much as their growth potential would require (due to insufficient numbers of successful pursuits). Predator reaction is a formal moniker for the metric.

Another perspective one could consider is the number of prey items they must consume annually. If an LMB requires 5 lbs of forage annually just to maintain itself (without growing), then how many prey items it needs depends on the size of prey it is consuming. If consuming prey that averages 1% of its body weight, it would take 500 prey items annually. If 5%, then it would take just 100. My guess is that it probably doesn't matter much which average size it consumes so long as either prey size is numerous enough to support the consumption of 5 times body weight annually. That is where the predator reaction function may be important. The reaction function is at least in part related to the frequency of encounters (population density) and success of pursuits (how difficult the prey is to consume when afforded an opportunity for pursuit). These two influencers of reaction are related to prey size, I think.

There was a paper I've posted here in the past on the relative sizes of consumed prey. The data was collected from numerous state DOWs over many years. For LMB, the median relative weight was about 0.92%, this suggests that to be maintained, these LMB were consuming ~ 540 prey items annually. Does a similar relationship exist in ponds?

Ewest, i guess what I am thinking, maybe incorrectly, was if i add F1s I can make the LMB population more aggressive and less hook shy. The place i work is a retreat for pastors who are burned out and thinking of leaving ministry. We host 2 groups a week of up to 15 people per group so the ponds get heavy fishing pressure. I would not have the budget at work to add F1s directly but I can bring them into my home pond and then share some of the offspring over the years. I am also assuming the current LMB where i work in SC are Florida strain but would have been stocked before I started working there.

Jpsdad, the place i work would be a perfect location for your experiment related to ponds and relative size of consumed prey. The main pond is 23’ deep and averages 12’ over 12 acres. We have 8 aerators, 3 feeders and booming populations of BG, RES, and TFS. It was originally dug as a sand mine for road construction so the bottom is not a bowl but peaks and valleys with submerged timber long one side and a gradual slope along the other. There are 2 submerged road beds coming to and from an island in the middle that serve as bedding sites.

F1's don't "make" more F1's. You'd have to start with Floridas and cross them with Northerns. BUT then the bigger problem is how to determine what is an F1 in a pond setting?

Sounds like a fish fry is in order😊

EVERY year, just to keep the pond somewhat in balance!