Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Please dont harm the bass!

So Bob stocked my little 3.5 acres with 5K 2-3 inch CNB, 1500 3-4 inchers 1500 red ear, 2-3 inchers 3 months ago...

tons of FHM, already had FHM and golden shiners growing,

300 8 inch feed trained bass!

It is cooling down now, and the bass are being crazy aggressive on the aquamax feeders now.

My boys 5 and 7 year old are now addicted to fishing.

We have been using small jigs with the barb bent down to catch these bass. so far i have not seen any of them harmed, but the boys want there independence in the fish they catch. Do you think if i get them a Boga grip they could remove the hooks and or handle the fish with less trauma.

Any chance to make these bass hook shy at an early age?

I want to encourage the boys to love fishing, but i also want to be very careful with my original generation of feed trained bass.




Any thoughts on balancing the two? i think teaching proper fish handling along with caution and not using treble hooks will be the best thing...

Thanks

Dustin

Maybe Lusk will weigh in on this topic or someone will find the old topic where this was discussed several years ago.
In Robert-NJ's example above I think his experiences and example noted above do agree with the study results stated in the IN-Fisherman magazine about catchability of LMB. This is why Rbt-NJ is recatching some of his larger bass. The recaught fish are in the group as noted as ""Remaining 27% were recaught between 4 and 22 times."" IMO a few of Rbt-NJ's bass are in the group I call dumb fish. Some fish, a percentage of every population, are vulnerable to lures and do not learn quickly. Thus, if those fish are not removed from the community they 'live on' to make anglers happy. The problem in public waters is these "dumb" fish are usually removed early from the gene pool, leaving behind "wiser" fish as noted by CB1 in his clear water big bass gravel pit experience above. We have had similar discussions years ago on this forum. I'm not sure that I can find those posts. In those posts I think Bob Lusk noted that he does not believe fish are smart and they don't think and probably don't learn? Fish only respond to stimuli.

A link to this topic was placed in the LMB Management topic of the Common Pond Q&A Archives.