Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Fish Weight Monitoring

After reading a Lusk article on this a couple of years ago, I've been monitoring fish weight for about a year, and have noticed that last year all fish were above the relative weights shown on this site. But this year only the 15" Bass are above relative weight. Longer than 15" the fish drop to 70-90% of relative weight. I'm not clear though on what fish should be taken out - the larger ones or the smaller? We're fishing all we can, and mostly preferring the larger ones for obvious reasons. Should we make more effort to get the smaller ones out too? The lake is about 35acres Soil Conservation (similar to Otto's recent article about silting), and although we're in a drought it's holding up at normal summer levels. Thanks!

If I understand correctly (a big if), I'd say there's plenty of forage fish the right size for 15" bass to utilize efficiently, while larger forage is sparse.

Possible corrective measures would include:
-thin the larger bass (thin the thin ones first, keep the fattest/fattest growing)
-thin the smaller bass, in the hope that more forage will grow to a larger size (sounds like a poor argument to me)
-adjust the forage base to have larger meals available for large bass

WRT the third option, what forage fish do you have currently?

It would help to know the size distribution of bass in the population.
For example - If you catch 20 fish how many are 8-12 inches,12-15 inches and longer than 15 inches? An excellent proportional size distribution (PSD) for fish over 12 inches is 60. An excellent proportion longer than 15 inches is 10 to 20. Thin where you have a surplus in that size group.