Norm, In my 6-7 acre lake, I have a population of Black Crappie. They were already in the lake when we purchased the lake, so we inhertited them. At that time, there were LMB, Yellow Perch, Black Crappie, Blue Gill, Brown Bullheads, and various other creek type minnows, chubs, & suckers.
In my opinion, things seemed balanced overall as far as my LMB population. The biggest LMB in my pond at that time was maybe 5-6lbs. The crappie that we would catch would be from 5-7", so they were not thriving, yet they were not at all overpopulating the lake.
In the past few years, I've added new predators in the form of Smallmouth, more LMB, CC, and twelve HSB (total weight of the twelve HSB was 26 lbs.). I had added (5) HSB, and (15) Trout about two years ago, but have never seen them since.
I have also been adding large quantities of baitfish, usually 150-200 lbs. at a time each for the past two to three years.
In addition to the new predator base, I also culled about 35-40 Crappie.
Now we are catching Crappie in the 10-12" range.
I must state that my goals are for diversity, with hopefully healthy fish accross all species. If I had a goal of trophy fish of one species or another, I would have taken different steps.
