I don’t see any weakness in your outside the box thinking. I agree with what you said although I didn’t think multiple 1000s of BG would need to go but hey you are lot more in the know than me so we have plan....know anyone that wants some CNBG? Free! We had a bumper crop of LMB two years ago so they,BG are the target species. Snipe the LMB I think target the BCP of 8” cause of their shape whereas a 8” BG is harder to swallow. Used to catch 8” BCP all the time, now can’t catch hardly any. After catching a couple 10# + LMB I know why.....
This may or may not be the case.. I have to keep in mind that there may be other reasons for this.. some we may not understand yet, such as the required forage for BCP to do best. Do we know that element is present for sure? What does the intermediate size structure of LMB look like and how has it affected the available (read preferred) forage for the advanced BCP, which will be competing for a size similar to what most of those intermediate bass are looking for. Did we run into a wall on forage availability?
I'm not going to say BCP won't eat small BG but I don't believe that's high on the preferred list.
What I'm trying to say is there may be things changing that we can't see-maybe some of those elements that aren't so obvious we can point a finger at it without question.
I'm glad to hear the other posters are having success removing Crappie, but I also know by changing 1 element in the pond setting, there are multiple changes-or can be multiple changes that occur that we may not plan for.
One thing I feel fairly confident in saying is that the younger the fish the more diverse it's diet is, which I can also say with some certainty that as a fish grows, it "can" and usually does begin to use prey items that are not as frequently used by smaller fish. Behavior and patterns change and I am no expert at putting my fingers on that in this case.
I do NOT want to cause an imbalance based on a lack of knowledge here. I would love to hear some input by Lusk, jpsdad, Cody, ewest and the likes here to see if my thought train is way off base.
