Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Changing Course - Old Pond, New Journey

I'd like to document our journey for the PB community as it unfolds, because I think we're willingly fighting an uphill battle, which should be fun and educational even if it's ultimately unsuccessful.

Background
My family has a 0.5ac, 20 year-old pond. Stocked with LMB, BG, PS, and 5 GC, with several other species thrown in over the years which never seemed to recruit (e.g., BCP, YP, SMB, RBT). Pond was not managed up till this year, meaning we practiced almost purely catch and release during that time (I think in the last 5 years, my Dad and brother harvested a couple LMB, maybe 5 BG, and 2-3 each of the only YP and BCP which made it through and were quite large). Pond is owned by the folks, so they get final say on what we do with the pond.

The Journey So Far
I've asked several questions here with the mindset/hope that we would drain, nuke, and restock from scratch. I think all parties like SMB and YP, so a hard reset would be the surest way to have an easily managed SMB/YP fishery. So this Spring, we began our attempt at "fishing out" the pond, for fun and as a matter of curiosity regarding carrying capacity, and also to not just kill off a bunch of perfectly innocent fish. I'll call this the "Great Fish Massacre of 2019", for my own entertainment. So, our harvest results to date are as follows (most harvested in April):

• BG - 129 - Most all 8-8.5" and good body condition
• LMB - 28 - 2 @ 14" (okay body condition), 2 @ 12" (okay body condition), 2 @ 3.5-4", remaining 22 in 10-11" and very skinny. 6 males, 20 females (2 little bass unknown sex).
• PS - 4 - All about 8.5" and thick.
• BCP - 1 - 10".

Observations about the water: Our pond lies at the foot of a mountain, with no farmland around and no BOWs upstream. It is fed by streams that originate on the mountain and run through the woods, and these streams run pretty consistently year-round at a pretty high flow rate (sorry, no GPM). Our pond water seems very clean, with none of the dank smell a lot of ponds get, and our fish taste incredibly good (even the bass); almost a sweet taste. Pond had a nice deep green cast throughout April, but now in May the water's gotten extremely clear (still has a green cast, but just much clearer than before). No Secchi, but I can see the bottom of our overflow pipe and some branches that are at least 5' deep. It seems some of the green phytoplankton cast has been replaced by FA growth, because most of the bottom is covered with FA.

Observations about the remaining fish population: I began trapping out juvenile BG (removed about 150), but have since stopped as we've changed plans. Now in the shallows we can still see hundreds (probably thousands) of 1-4" BG. There's at least 1 BCP remaining, which I know because I hooked it once but it quick-released before landing. Note that the BCP never seemed to spawn, so I think this may be the last BCP in the pond, because my brother stocked just a couple 2-3 years ago. PS have never seemed to recruit in our pond and they only appear in low numbers in local ponds, so we're not sure if they're just dumb and all the YoY get eaten, if BG bully them out of good spawning areas, or if the water chemistry just isn't quite right for their spawning around here. We have yet to see a single YoY LMB, which obviously could have to do with us removing most all the adult LMB (especially females) before spawning season. I've seen a pack of 3 LMB at about 4-5", and 1 LMB at about 12" that I've watched several days making laps around the shallow part of the pond. I'm not 100% sure it's always the same bass, but I suspect it might be. It's nearly uncatchable. The pond is quite clear, and I can get a high vantage point and watch the whole pond at once (seeing probably 4-5' deep all around) and in recent days I only ever see this one lonely 12" bass. Note that the little BG are more "adventurous" now after the Great Fish Massacre of 2019, meaning that they venture out deeper and further away from cover than ever before. This all makes me wonder if we haven't harvested most all of the LMB.

The New Plan
As we caught and ate lots of LMB and BG, Dad decided he really couldn't imagine a pond without BG and that catching high numbers of eating-sized fish was more fun than chasing a few trophy bass. Thus, the folks have decided they don't want to drain the pond, so the BG and LMB are here to stay, even though we now don't care at all about our LMB (we're adopting Condello's philosophy, that our LMB are just panfish management devices), and we'd rather have moderate numbers of eating-sized BG than trophies. I also made a couple cloverleaf traps, and everyone involved seems entertained by trapping YoY. Everyone seems quite into angling, trapping, and generally managing the pond going forward. My Dad's a stoic guy, but he does seem to get excited about having YP moreso than any other species, so I saw a couple options:
1. LMB and BG pond: Conventional wisdom is that YP won't really thrive with LMB present, so give up and let the LMB and BG populations and size structures recover, and manage for fairly high numbers of eating-sized BG.
2. Uphill battle - YP, BG, and LMB pond: Aim for high numbers of harvestable BG and YP, and culling all LMB (angling and trapping them aggressively) so as to protect YP population with hopes that they might recruit a little bit, and also trapping and removing BG heavily so they don't stunt. Pellet feed YP and BG (and disable or cut up trapped YoY BG to feed them to YP).

So naturally, we picked the uphill battle, #2. If it fails, the pond should drift back towards a LMB and BG pond anyways, so why not take a swing and have some fun managing heavily? I've prepared the family mentally for the battle to come and what the probable outcome is. We can source wild-caught SMB, so we'll pay attention to our YoY numbers and if by some miracle we do actually eliminate or over-control our LMB, we plan to stock a few SMB as needed to help with panfish YoY control.

Next Steps

• Continue attempts at removing the last stubborn LMB.
• Establish rooted vegetation. We need to remove our GC, which we can't catch, so we're actually considering shooting them or buying a bowfishing rig to take them out.
• Get larger pellet-trained YP. I'm arranging an order of 6-8" pellet-trained YP right now, to be picked up hopefully soon. We're thinking most should survive given how much we've knocked the LMB population back and that any stragglers are likely to be small (12" or less) given what we saw during the Great Fish Massacre of 2019. We're thinking of ordering around 150.

Any thoughts or comments? I'm especially interested in hearing what people think about the plan to stock 150 6-8" pellet-trained YP, given that I'm getting ready to put in the order and hope to pick them up soon.

Also, any thoughts on why the LMB we've harvested are so skewed towards females? Is it possible that the population is skewed female-heavy, or could the males just still be spawning quite deep (note that we haven't seen a single LMB on a bed, even with the super clear water, thought we do seem to have had some BG spawning, if the tiny 1" BG are any indication)?

Shorty,
It's very well possible that we do have a couple bigger LMB lurking somewhere in the deep. My sampling methods may be lacking, but via trapping I can catch hundreds of BG from 1-3" close to the shore, and just visually now that the water's clearer I can see good numbers of what I'd guess to be 4-5" BG out a little further from shore. I've thrown in 5" chunks of nightcrawler on the medium sized hooks I use to catch bass and larger BG and can watch good numbers of little 4-5" BG attacking the bait, though they obviously can't swallow that large of bait or hook. We did catch some BG in the 7-8" range, I'd guess maybe 10-15% of those harvested. I'm not sure about the range around 6" though.

It just puzzles me that if the pond really was bass overcrowded (as evidenced by them most all being extremely skinny, and us only ever seeing/catching a couple bass over 13" in the past decade, and the BG growing to nice sizes), why are there so many BG juveniles this year (I don't think we had so many in recent years)? We've only harvested 56 LMB/acre, and now the BG juveniles are venturing out 20' from shore into open water whereas they always used to stay tight to the bank and cover due to predatory pressure. It also appears that the LMB haven't spawned well in recent years, as we never see any YoY bass, we never see the bass making or guarding nests, both of which we always used to see every year earlier in the life of the pond. The males we harvested were especially skinny, so all this makes me wonder if the LMB population could truly be skewed that heavily towards females. I'm trying to make theories to rationalize this; for example, is it possible that in the last couple years, the LMB being very overcrowded and super skinny, that many of those adult males actually died after the spawn due to being really skinny to start with and then not eating, guarding nests, and general spawn stress? And then this year, are we just starting to see the effects of them dying, that being the little BG population rebounding? Another potential factor is that these bass were stocked 20 years ago and no new genetics have been introduced since then, so could there be some inbreeding or stale genetics issues affecting their ability to spawn?

Another observation: I've read multiple times that GC will not eat algae, but just to add a data point, I did sacrifice an old GC (12 years-old, 34" long, 20 lbs), and its stomach contents looked to be 100% FA. It's worth noting that we don't have really any rooted vegetation, so I suppose its options were to eat FA or starve. Maybe you'd get a different result in a pond where it had some rooted/leafy vegetation to pick from.

Stocking Update: I went ahead and picked up and stocked 150 feed-trained 6-8" YP, along with 50 3-4" RES (I realize most RES will get eaten, but they were cheap; I'm just hoping that with the LMB really thinned out and a horde of little BG to distract them, a few of the RES should survive to adulthood.). All fish survived the 5-hour trip (I transported them enclosed inside my car with a blanket over the boxes to keep it dark and blasted the AC on max the whole way home), and so far I've only seen 2 RES (in the shallows) and 2 YP (saw their white bellies in about 6 and 8 ft of water) that have died in the few days since stocking. We do have a new snapping turtle in the pond since yesterday, so I wonder if there are more YP dying in deeper water and if the turtle's just there to clean up. The good news is that most of the YP have schooled and are staying in the shallow end at all hours around a few submerged branches, so I can see them easily and thus can see that maybe 50 (by my estimation) are still alive and well. I feed this group every evening, and they weren't really interested in the pellets after one day in the pond, but now on the second and third days they're starting to remember that they like pellets. They're still pretty shy about feeding on the surface (only at the end of the session a couple get adventurous enough to clean up some of the floating pellets), so I'm hydrating the pellets and have to squeeze several one-by-one to get them to immediately sink and "chum up" the water so they finally get back into feeding mode. If I just throw pellets on the surface, they get spooked by the commotion and never seem to go straight from chilling out on the bottom to hitting the top without being "seduced" slowly by a moderate number of squeezed sinking pellets. I occasionally see a YP wanderer in the shallows in other areas of the pond, and they seem to sit still on the bottom in the shallows in areas where schools of YoY BG hang out, so I wonder if they're hunting BG. These wanderers have the more typical yellow coloration, meaning they never really took to pellets that well in the hatchery (which would explain why they're out looking for schools of YoY BG), whereas the welfare YP school in the shallow end all have a more bluish tint that heavy pellet eaters seem to get.

Also, we saw exactly 1 crayfish in our shallow rocky nursery area, so apparently at least 1 has migrated up on its own from the creek. No idea of the species, but he didn't look like a Rusty by my amateur estimation.

Here's a long overdue update on our panfish-only pond experiment:

YP:
My brother and nephews regularly catch YP fishing, and stockers are mostly 12+" and quite fat. We have harvested about 40 of the original 130ish stockers that I estimate survived the initial transport and stocking in 2019. We stopped feeding pellets after the first year (2019), so the YP appear to be predating BG quite well overall; there's an occasional skinny 11" YP, but most all are very fat. My brother has opened a few YP that had small crayfish in their stomachs, so it appears we have a population of reproducing rusties that migrated up from the creek and the YP figured out what to do with them. They have also caught a couple 6" and 8" YP recently that are quite fat; this is about the size we stocked in spring 2019, so this leads me to believe that these are new YP recruited in the pond. Otherwise, we aren't seeing or catching hardly any smaller YP, and have never caught any in the traps, so this makes me believe that YP recruitment is very weak. I suspect this is mainly due to high numbers of small BG and now some smaller BCP. We saw YP ribbons and fry in 2020, saw ribbons in 2021 (people weren't around the pond much that year, so no one confirmed seeing fry), but this year we never saw any ribbons on the branches in the shallows. Hopefully there were a couple ribbons laid deep, out of sight. I'm considering stocking another round of YP in the coming years if necessary, and in the meantime we'll aggressively cull small BG and BCP to help with YP recruitment.

RES:
RES are doing very well. Initial 2019 stockers that were 3-4" are now around 7-8" and very thick. Our RES are pretty easy to catch and trap. We see RES of all sizes, so they're recruiting well. First sample of about 100 sunfish from 2022 early season trapping shows about 23% RES, 6% PS, 71% BG. I suspect there may be some hybridization between the redears and PS, because there is the occasional small sunfish in traps that makes me debate with myself between whether it's RES vs. PS, and I just can't ID it with certainty. We have harvested a few of the stockers.

LMB:
No sign of LMB. In the 2019 harvest there were definitely at least 2 LMB that evaded the cull. Recall that our water is typically very clear, and the pond is steep, so the LMB used to cruise the shallow ring around the outside where they were easy to see on occasion. We saw those remaining 2 LMB regularly in 2019, and had a few sightings in 2020, but they are nowhere to be seen since. Before, we always used to see LMB YoY in the shallows, but we have yet to see a single small LMB since 2019. I'm cautiously optimistic that somehow, we may have actually gotten rid of our LMB population longer term (maybe due to luck of remaining LMB being the same sex). I still suspect that at least the younger LMB from 2019 is still alive (and big) somewhere down deep, but it's very strange in our pond that we don't see any new juveniles. Some YP behaviorally seem to be filling the old niche of the LMB, where the YP will actually lone-wolf cruise the shallows between spots of cover hunting BG.

BCP:
BCP actually do spawn in our pond, apparently. They're recruiting now without the pressure from LMB. We're still determining population size, but so far numbers appear to be manageable. Several BCP in the 4.5-6" range are being seen, caught, and trapped, and their body condition is actually pretty good. We haven't seen a skinny BCP yet. Regardless, we are now removing all BCP aggressively. I think they may be helping to manage the BG YoY fairly well, but are also probably suppressing YP recruitment. In traps, I have a higher success rate trapping BCP when I soak the trap for hours at a time. I get the best yields on our sunfish with shorter soaks of the trap, because it seems they're smart enough to find their way back out given enough time. I think the BCP on the other hand are just happy chilling in the trap for hours on end.

BG:
BG are doing as BG do. Without the LMB, the BG size structure has recovered and looks almost healthy, with the caveats that we may have cropped the biggest sizes too agressively, because we don't see as many BG over 6" as we used to, and obviously with YP and BCP as our apex predators, we have overabundant small BG that probably limit BG growth rates and suppress YP recruitment. We used to have a barbell distribution of BG when the LMB were present, with a decent many 1-3" BG and 7+" BG and nothing in between, so now we have moderate-high numbers of 1-3" like before, but now we have lots of 3-5" BG as well. My brother is harvesting smaller adult BG, and going forward we will now trap and remove smaller BG aggressively this year.

PS:
PS seem to do the same in our pond regardless of what is going on around them, meaning that they always recruit in low numbers, have a reasonable-looking size structure, and a few bigger adults.