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.

It is not good to have a feeding program and then stop. Your LMB have been eating fish as well as feed all along. They will continue to do so. There can be a number of reasons for large variation in year class size with natural mortalities (predation)being one. This could be a factor in both LMB year class size and BG year class size. The question is why did things change this year? Bill has good advice on removing BG if needed. Be sure you need to remove some first though. You can do a seine survey to help determine the population status. Under the right circumstances I would reduce feeding if necessary but not just stop. I would if needed remove BG by seine and/or angling and reduce feeding as a last resort.

ewest also has good advice. After assessing the small young of year BG density, maybe do a blended program of cut back on amount of daily pellets added. Adding a lower number of pellets keeps making the focused distracted surface feeding BG easier for the bass to attack and eat the smaller fish. Then see if this technique is working. Then in Spring,,,,, if you still think there are still too many small BG, then decide how to proceed.

However --- temporarily stopping pelleting or reducing it, the LMB will grow slower but they will quickly figure out that BG are good food, if the LMB do not already know that behavior. Reducing pellet feeding will make the LMB hungrier and I think they will then eat more BG to satisfy their big hunger need.

Another option would be to add a few more largemouth in Spring based on what you think is the needed number. Remember each well fed LMB can easily eat 300-350 BG per year. That is a lot of fish to be eliminated for each bass present. Many pond owners here on the PB Forum have the problem of too many bass and not enough forage fish to feed them for the LMB to grow the best they can grow. Sometimes it is better to have too many small edible fish rather than too few small fishes to keep the predators growing well. Thus this type of pond owner is often or regularly adding more forage fish. Be careful to not create this problem for yourself. Note --- IMO and experience the new upcoming crops of young bass will not eat pellets because most bass are very predatory by instinct and bass at small 1"-2" sizes need to be diligently trained to eat pellets.