Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Feeding Working to feed train bluegill and struggling

If those are the LESS EMACIATED smallmouth, then I feel sorry for the skinny ones!

Since your BG and RES look good, then I am going to assume your pond water is healthy. If that is true, then your SMB population is still WAY too large for your pond size. I suspect they were either initially stocked at too great of rate, or they did manage to reproduce in your pond and were not culled by the previous owner.

Keep catching and culling would be my (non-expert) advice. Hopefully you can grow some larger SMB in there such that they will start reducing your BG crop so THEY don't overpopulate.

What is the biggest SMB you have caught?

Another option would be to add some obviously egg-bearing female LMB via bucket stocking next spring. In a pond of your small size, a small population of female-only LMB with your existing population of stunted SMB might provide a nicely balanced pond?

Good luck with your ongoing improvements!

Thank you,

Yes will keep culling the SMB each visit to the pond.

Largest SMB so far was at 14" and it looked good, caught on a 3 or 4 inch green sunfish I caught and culled.

My impression was that the SMB population was/is way out of control and the BG population was nearly wiped out. Restocking BG, RE, FHM seems to be working with the structure and cover I have also added. If I can get teh BG boiling on the feeder I will feel more confident.

Working to correct low Alkalinity as well but PH, etc all look good currently.

It would be a blessing if you could find a home for SMB you remove.

Here's some food for thought.

Largemouth Bass need fish to eat that are roughly 1/4 to 1/3 their body length (when talking about ovoid shaped panfish like Bluegill, Redear Sunfish, etc.) They can eat much longer fish that are more fusiform in shape (golden shiners, yellow perch, etc.

A Smallmouth Bass has a gape that is on average 15%-25% smaller than a Largemouth Bass of the same body length.

So, you need to manage the forage fish for that size range according to the size of the SMB in the pond. Yellow Perch and Golden Shiners are much more of a fusiform shape than Bluegill. Golden Shiners are readily available in Arkansas from the myriad of fish farms there, YP not so much - I don't know of ANY fish farms in AR that raise YP.

Also you could have all the food needed in the pond if the SMB don't have places to hang out and ambush their prey from. So, cover for the predators is important too. Just as important as having the correct numbers fo predators and keeping the predators thinned out.