Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Fin Clipping

I’m fairly aggressive on my LMB culling. Anything 12” and smaller gets taken out. I recently read about clipping the tail fin of these size bass and leaving them in the pond for larger bass to eat. Has anyone done this? Does it seem to work? How much of the tail fin do you clip? Thanks for any insight. I’ve really enjoyed learning here.

Electrofished the pond today. Took out about 30 bass 13” and under. Clipped all tails and multiple fins on each cull. On the second pass of electrofishing, one of the larger bass had already pushed one of the clipped culls into shallow water and was definitely going to eat it. My guess is none of the culls survive 24 hours. I have enough bass in the 6lb-10lb range to gobble them up. Largest fish shocked up today was 8lbs. I’m adding gizzard shad soon and will be adding trout for the second winter in a row. I’d really like to push these 7lb fish to 9-10lbs as quickly as possible.

Me and the kids have clipped around 10 cull fish the last 2 days. We clipped multiple fins so I’m certain they will be easy meals for whatever decides to eat them. My pond is being electro fished on Friday so I’m curious to see if we happen to shock any of them up. I don’t think we will. I scanned the pond closely this evening trying to spot any of the fish clipped yesterday and I couldn’t find any. They are pretty easy to spot once clipped and thrown back in. I don’t think they survived the night.

Please return to share the results of your shock survey, very few of us have the luxury of the information gathered from such a survey.