Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Examining Stomach Contents

I read the thread on snail control and it made me think about the importance of examining stomach contents when cleaning fish.

Every time I cull a fish to eat, after I fillet each fish, a single knife stroke extra gives an absolute wealth of data.

For people that are new to all of this, I felt like it was valuable to share with you. For example, the last time I culled fish, several of my fish had absolutely nothing in their stomachs. The rest of them had small bluegill and at least two of the bass had pellets from my bluegill feeder.

Those observations alone:
1.) I need more forage fish and/or I have too many bass. Too many empty stomachs!!
2.) Pellet eating bass! I hate I culled two pellet eating bass because those are factors I can control easily. What a waste!
3.) No other forage than baby bluegill were discovered. Should I diversify forage?

Hope that helps all the new guys out there trying to manage well!

Ah yes, one can always use the 'lavage' method too which does not kill the fish.

This was demonstrated at one of the Pond Boss Conferences.

Theo had developed the slogan for that show: "Come for the otolith aging, stay for the lepomis sexing!"



....or something like that.

Be careful on letting RW make your decision at this time of year (May) this will be a post spawn time when many LMB could lose alot of weight
In my pond all fish had RW numbers in the 115 - 120% range thru Mid April. Come May - Mid June the RW crashed, I thought something was seriously wrong
When I say the RW Crashed, I'm talking the fish went down to between 95 - 105% which is a bunch IMO
Without changing a thing It took until Late August for the RW to get back to where I thought it should be. Currently most of my fish have RW over 120%.
Here in the next few months we will see which way they trend

ML19 - That is a very good status report about the progress of your pond fishery. Thanks for taking the time to post the info. It looks like you are on track with the right philosophy and methods to grow some good high quality bass. Looking forward to your next informative report. You are wise in not fishing the pond frequently to produce hook shy bass.

Wanted to circle back to this thread and update it for new pond managers.

Saturday, we caught 20 bass from our pond and kept 17. The 3 we threw back had a relative weight of over 100%. The 17 we kept had a relative weight below 100%; a sign of insufficient forage to predator ratio.

Of the 17 kept, 14 had empty stomachs. Another sign of insufficient forage to predator ratio.

Unfortunately, we had to keep a 2 pound 0 ounce, 16 inch largemouth because it was hooked in the gills and was bleeding profusely. Other than that mishap, I'm very happy with our harvest. We fed the entire family and have now created a lot more room for the existing fish.

I will not fish the pond again for bass until May in which I will once again let the relative weights steer me in the correct management direction.

Depending on LMB size, my rule of thumb is pre-spawn LMB females have 7%-15% of body weight in eggs, males half of that. In a pond where the goal is to grow large bass, I don't want to see a LMB's RW minus the egg/milt weight at less than 110% RW.. I have seen some feed trained bass that were sitting at 165-173 RW in October.





Was that a healthy fish? No. I say no because would you consider a 400 pound person to be healthy?


Having a slot harvest size vs. RW harvest slot depends on the size of the forage fish surveyed. Just remember that a fishery has to continually grow the size of the forage fish or the LMB will expend more and more calories for every successful fish capture, and could eventually expend more energy than what the capture equals. Having the proper cover for the predatory LMB in the pond is critical too. If a marathon runner and a couch potato has the same caloric intake per day, who will weigh more in a month or a year?