Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Feeding Stop Feeding- Will Bass Return to Foraging ?

Have been feeding the bass in my 1/2 acre pond for two years now, but have noticed an abundance of baby BG swimming around - obviously not being cropped back by the bass as in previous years. If I stop feeding the bass, will they return to eating the BG or will that not happen now that they are feed trained ?

I am not crazy about having an explosion of BG in the pond to have to deal with.

I think the pellet eating LMB will revert to eating fish when the pellet feeding stops. This is why. A pro-fishery manager Shawn Banks in MO reported on the PBoss forum years ago that he had an over population of small fish mostly BG in one of his ponds with hybrid striped bass. Note - HSB are always raised on pellets from hatchlings thus they are strongly habituated to pellets. Shawn quit feeding pellets and then the HSB commenced eating the small BG to reduce the BG to a better density. I think the predatory nature of LMB will act very similarly as the HSB when pellet feeding is stopped. Note – It may take several months and into maybe next summer to see a noticeable reduction of your numbers of small BG.

The other thing that you could do is to manually by using a long (30-60ft) beach seine, a couple good fish traps (Z-traps or cloverleaf style) and/or some worm and bobber fishing to speed up the removal of your small BG. With a small hook and worm under a bobber from shallow water, I can catch around 30 – 40 small BG per hour when they are abundant. If the BG are really small - micro-fishing is an option. See examples of it on YouTube. For your youngsters put a price bounty on each small BG they catch. Keep the money in the family.