Originally posted by GW:
Has anyone tried this?
That's basically what I do in my small pond that is stocked with the GG's. The nice thing about the GG's is they are the least likely fish to get conditioned that I have seen in ponds....maybe aggressivenes is the positive way of saying it. For the LMB predator in that TGG pond, the original LMB stockers were fin clipped and will always be returned when caught and all other LMB will always removed. All Fx offspring are removed and none of the original GG's are removed.
In my larger ponds, fishing pressure is the key to fish conditioning. Since I choose to fish most every day, I have to be very careful about managing fishing pressure. My approach is to rotate among ponds and locations within the ponds. Unless fishing with guests, my fishing is always done in low light conditions and for short periods of time....e.g. the last couple of hours of daylight or first hour of sunrise.
Multiple ponds allow you to minimize the effects of fishing pressure and conditioning. It works for me and the proof is that I'm enjoying fantastic fishing this spring like I have never before seen or experienced in ponds.
Some of you guys who go back a ways on the Forum will remember a discussion thread I started on multiple small ponds vs one larger pond. It was my belief back then that multiple small ponds would facilitate minimizing fish conditioning...this has indeed been the case for me. Three ponds of 3 acres can be far superior to one pond of 9 or 10 acres, from a fish conditioning standpoint. In addition, I see no sacrifice of top end size in fish from multiple smaller ponds vs single large ones.
A fish does not have to be caught to be conditioned. Everything I see in fishing points to this. A bonefish on a shallow saltwater flat that observes his budddies being caught on a funny looking fly becomes just as conditioned as a LMB that observes the same event in a pond.
However, the mechanism for conditioning fish that only "observe" other fish being caught is not at all certain, to me. Whether it is indeed observed behavior or some other form of communication, its clear to me that a fish can be conditioned without being caught. Fortunately, there are management approaches which can minimize those effects.
