Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - stocking crayfish

I have a 1.5 acre pond in South Central Minnesota, stocked with LMB and BG. It's ten years old and doing fine - many thanks to advice I got from the Pond Boss forums, although I need to do some corrective harvesting to bring my populations back in check. The LMB are 12-14 inches and somewhat underweight. There is riprap around half of this pond and some block structure on the bottom (I do need to add to this).
There is a new 1/8 acre pond next to it (not connected) that was dug last fall. My grand scheme is to use that for new forage with FHM. 25 lbs of minnows were added last week. I'm thinking I'd like to also add Virile Crayfish to that small pond for more forage (and the occasional crawfish boil). The plant life in the new pond isn't well-established yet, but in the short term I was thinking that the fish I remove from the big pond can be gutted and thrown in the new pond for the crayfish. I was also thinking that the crayfish that get antsy and walk the 20 feet over to the big pond would be easy pickins for the LMB.

I've picked through the threads I could find about crayfish, and they make me fairly confident that my little scheme "should" work. BUT!
Can anybody poke holes in my plans? Will I have problems with crayfish reproduction rates? Will they tear up my shoreline? Are my LMB big enough to eat them and keep their population in check?

Thanks a bunch to all!

I have about 440 foot of bank and 110 foot of it is rocked with 3 to 18" rock...mostly 6" rocks. The rest of the pond is steep banked. I'd say I have plenty of rock, maybe too much. I am taking the craws out to help with water clarity.

CZ, a 12-14 inch bass can eat any crayfish you are likely to grow. I wouldn't worry about that.

If you want to maximize LMB benefit from forage pond, you might consider adding BG. True, they'll eat the FHM, but LMB gain far more from eating BG than FHM anyway. And I don't believe too many crayfish would be eaten by the BG.

But it ultimately depends on your priorities & goals. Boiled crawfish sounds mighty good to this Louisiana boy!

That sounds like a good plan. I would suggest adding rip‐rap to the forage pond to keep the craws feeling at home. You don't need to gut the culled fish... the craws don't care, they eat anything.

QA gifted me with 97 Virile crays two summers ago. I stocked them in my main pond.
Now there are thousands of them. I trapped a couple hundred of them last summer
and moved those to my bait pond.

Haven't noticed them tunneling in the banks at either pond.

I toss the carcasses of fish that I butcher into the bait pond for the crays to clean up.
They also get any varmints that happen to meet their doom while raiding Mrs. Augie's
flower gardens and bird feeders.