Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain Examining Stomach Contents

I read the thread on snail control and it made me think about the importance of examining stomach contents when cleaning fish.

Every time I cull a fish to eat, after I fillet each fish, a single knife stroke extra gives an absolute wealth of data.

For people that are new to all of this, I felt like it was valuable to share with you. For example, the last time I culled fish, several of my fish had absolutely nothing in their stomachs. The rest of them had small bluegill and at least two of the bass had pellets from my bluegill feeder.

Those observations alone:
1.) I need more forage fish and/or I have too many bass. Too many empty stomachs!!
2.) Pellet eating bass! I hate I culled two pellet eating bass because those are factors I can control easily. What a waste!
3.) No other forage than baby bluegill were discovered. Should I diversify forage?

Hope that helps all the new guys out there trying to manage well!

Great advice, thanks for the post!

"3.) No other forage than baby bluegill were discovered. Should I diversify forage?"

Unless you add something invasive, or something that may out-compete your most desired species, I think it is almost always a good idea to diversify forage.

What species are currently in your pond? What is the size distribution of your top predators and/or main "goal" fish?

There are lots of experts at Pond Boss on diversifying pond food chains. Hopefully some will drop into your post. (Or you may have to start a new thread to get more on topic views?)

Based on your location, have you considered golden shiners? They can provide a great mass of forage fish calories. Especially if you have some typical MS thick vegetation for them to hide and thrive.

Yes, added golden shiners and culled more bass. Additionally will be adding crawfish as the price per lb drops in the spring.

Decisions already made thanks to dissecting!!

Ah yes, one can always use the 'lavage' method too which does not kill the fish.

This was demonstrated at one of the Pond Boss Conferences.

Theo had developed the slogan for that show: "Come for the otolith aging, stay for the lepomis sexing!"



....or something like that.

If you are considering Golden Shiner Frye from Anderson's Fish Farm, it's best to call them now to get on the list.

In my experience, bass LOVE crawfish. However, they will be expensive snacks if the bass are so effective at predation that they never allow you to create a breeding population.

The crawfish in my area love a big, jumbled pile of "platy" rocks to hide in the crevices. Do you have that type of habitat for them? Or if you stock mud burrowing types will they have good habitat?

I believe crawfish with good habitat can create lots of pounds of excellent forage per year, especially in your warm waters.

There are a lot of crawfish around my pond but they seem to mostly exist to undermine the shoreline, the dam, and the spillway. I've never seen one in the pond itself or in a fish's stomach. Never caught one in a trap either. YMMV obviously.

I give fish a good squeeze when scaling to see what they had been eating previously.

Yep.

There are comments in the forum from people that love crawfish, and from people that hate crawfish!

My (non-expert) advice would be to get a correct species identification of any crawfish you are planning to put into your pond, and make sure you get a type where the traits create a net beneficial situation for your pond.

I have never seen much crawfish around the pond, I have tried stocking some that I got from a fellow pondmiester Quarter Acre, but I do see some crawfish mounds on occasion around the pond but I find a lot of crawfish remains in almost all of my LMB and CC that I catch, so I must have a decent population of crawfish reproducing in the pond.

Wanted to circle back to this thread and update it for new pond managers.

Saturday, we caught 20 bass from our pond and kept 17. The 3 we threw back had a relative weight of over 100%. The 17 we kept had a relative weight below 100%; a sign of insufficient forage to predator ratio.

Of the 17 kept, 14 had empty stomachs. Another sign of insufficient forage to predator ratio.

Unfortunately, we had to keep a 2 pound 0 ounce, 16 inch largemouth because it was hooked in the gills and was bleeding profusely. Other than that mishap, I'm very happy with our harvest. We fed the entire family and have now created a lot more room for the existing fish.

I will not fish the pond again for bass until May in which I will once again let the relative weights steer me in the correct management direction.

ML19 - That is a very good status report about the progress of your pond fishery. Thanks for taking the time to post the info. It looks like you are on track with the right philosophy and methods to grow some good high quality bass. Looking forward to your next informative report. You are wise in not fishing the pond frequently to produce hook shy bass.

Be careful on letting RW make your decision at this time of year (May) this will be a post spawn time when many LMB could lose alot of weight
In my pond all fish had RW numbers in the 115 - 120% range thru Mid April. Come May - Mid June the RW crashed, I thought something was seriously wrong
When I say the RW Crashed, I'm talking the fish went down to between 95 - 105% which is a bunch IMO
Without changing a thing It took until Late August for the RW to get back to where I thought it should be. Currently most of my fish have RW over 120%.
Here in the next few months we will see which way they trend

That's good advice Jason D. I didn't consider that.

I think my May harvest may be a 10 inches and under harvest. Those little bass terrorize small bluegill before they have time to grow into sizable meals.

Depending on LMB size, my rule of thumb is pre-spawn LMB females have 7%-15% of body weight in eggs, males half of that. In a pond where the goal is to grow large bass, I don't want to see a LMB's RW minus the egg/milt weight at less than 110% RW.. I have seen some feed trained bass that were sitting at 165-173 RW in October.





Was that a healthy fish? No. I say no because would you consider a 400 pound person to be healthy?


Having a slot harvest size vs. RW harvest slot depends on the size of the forage fish surveyed. Just remember that a fishery has to continually grow the size of the forage fish or the LMB will expend more and more calories for every successful fish capture, and could eventually expend more energy than what the capture equals. Having the proper cover for the predatory LMB in the pond is critical too. If a marathon runner and a couch potato has the same caloric intake per day, who will weigh more in a month or a year?

A suggestion that comes with experience. RW is important but so is condition. RW changes so know the yearly history of each type of fish species. Learn to compare RW with how well conditioned a fish looks for that time of year. Base harvest choices on the 2 combined.

While on size, culling, RW, etc
I came upon a situation this evening
As most know, my pond was stocked fresh 9/14/23
So these 2 fish would have been stocked from the same place as the same size on the same date
Fish 1. 17” - 2.91# - 107% RW. Looked healthy but long and lean (I’m assuming male) was caught under the fish feeder.
Fish 2. 15.75” - 2.71# - 127% Did not have a huge belly, was just bulky. Was caught in more open water

What would you do?
Let both live to see another day or Cull fish 1 or Cull both ?
The average of all fish caught (27) between November 1 and today is 16.5” - 3.0#

A couple of things:

Your LMB population is modest in number due to an initial stocking of 20/acre. (with the exception of recruits that you have mentioned culling). There are some morts from the initial stocking (+ 6 culls) and so at this point, I do not think you have too many LMB of the initial stocking. On the other hand, you've mentioned other predators to include HSB, CC, and SMB. These may be where you should focus culling this year to help the LMB grow.

With regard to the two fish. I would be reluctant to classify Fish 1 a male. It is longer than the mean length of your samples and stands a good chance of being female. Personally, I would want to be sure the LMB culls are male and I would be reluctant to remove LMB longer than mean length and which are heavier in favor of keeping higher RW LMB of inferior weight and length (within the same year class). As for the difference in the RWs ... it may make sense from this standpoint. The existing consumable forage population may be sufficient to provide consumption to support ~3# LMB. IOWs, their number may support the number of encounter/pursuits required for consumption what would support ~3# LMB. If so, the RW reflects the pond conditions in this moment which might favor the smaller LMB in terms of RW. One should keep in mind that both the 15.75" and 17" LMB only have one mouth each and they can only be in one place at one time. Their encounters with prey are likely very similar. If the number of encounters are limiting consumption below satiation the smaller fish will likely have better RW.

I generally don't suggest culling the original stocker fish provided they were stocked in a normal (suggested #). It is the subsequent generations where culling is needed.

If you examine stomach contents at your pond, and find this, then you have a problem!

Cheating at Bass Tournament