Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - help only other option is electrofishing

to make a long story short my family has a lot of small farm/cattle ponds on about 600 acres of land, most are to small to really count anyway my brother and i against Everyones advice took a couple of the ponds ( we knew it could end badly so we picked ponds that no one would miss if the worst happened) so i put black crappie into 2 ponds one pond is about 1ac and the other is .6 acre i knew they could absolutely overpopulate in our area theres quite a few ponds in the 3-5 acre range with decent crappie but they are very heavy with small to medium bass for good reason as you all know. anyway we stocked about 25 adult 8-12inch black crappie in each pond this was prob 8-10 years ago. after that we started making sure there were plenty of bass in the 8-14 inch range to eat crappie spawn and we could always add bass that we cull from our other ponds so this is kinda like our experiment being that we love to have some variety and would love to get a couple dozen minnows and catch a mess of crappie on a whim, anyway the exact opposite happened from what i can tell. we have maybe caught 15 crappie out of each pond in all those 8 years, and the bass fishing has stayed good in the small 8-13inch range the crappie we have managed to catch are varying in size from 8inch to 13 or 14inch. i know crappie spawns are unpredictable but this is crazy its like pulling teeth just to catch one and you finally get one (using minnows so alot of what youll catch is little bass) you will think you are about to tear them up then you might catch one and they go cold?? what can i do? we have stopped releasing the BC we do catch and we took about 25 or so bass out of each pond last year thinking maybe we did too good of a job with the hungry little bass population, btw the ponds are fertilized and both have really nice BG as well. any thoughts would help me out and no i dont care if they overpopulate we crossed that bridge when we stocked them knowing that was a probability. sorry for the long post i just thought i would explain it well so you guys will know whats been done
my second question is way more simple i just dont want to start 2 threads, this 3rd pond is about 4-5 acres only stocked with bass/BG and a few channel catfish. after neglect we can catch 8-10 inch bass all day no matter how many we take out it never seems to help anything, btw this place has produced 5-6 pound bass in the past. we feed the BG. i think we need to just keep trying to remove bass and if that doesnt work i might try electrofishing, id like to try that in all the above mentioned ponds just to know exactly what is in them. thank you for any help or advice and im sorry for the novel ive written lol. have a great day- hugh

Crappie guy, I think what you are seeing is normal when there is a strong population of LMB and BG. Especially when BCP are introduced subsequently. The growth of your BCP is very good but the numbers are low.

BCP will do better without BG. If you could start over, it would be advantageous. If not you could try adding mid sized BCP on a ladder annually on a ladder. I think your recruitment is limited ... Mostly due to BG and a low starting population of BCP.

Crappie are attracted to light at night in the summer and fall. So from the dam this approach may help to concentrate them. They like brush too.

There is a lot here on crappie in ponds. They are an enigma within a conundrum - no easy answers.

I do want to point out the issue of catchability. Lots here on the subject as well and worth looking at wrt your problem. Every pond specie that I know of has a built in fear/harm/stress release indicator or several. When a fish is caught (hook & line) it releases those indicators (visual/chemical/other) and the other fish know to watch out.

crappieguy,
This sounds the same as a pond a guy in my area experienced with LMB,BG, and BCP. The only difference being that he catches mostly BG. Like jpsdad said I don’t think BG are a good mix with BC. The only thing I can add is I had some BG mixed in with my RES and I am trapping and killing every one that I catch.

The problem I’m having with to many BG is that they are eating the BCP and LMB eggs essentially stopping recruitment. I also have golden shiners