YP gender is easy - flip them over and look at the urogenital opening. Males have round pores, females have crescents. There are a lot of photos on PB posted on this, many of which are mine IIRC.
If you are serious about managing your fishery and achieving your goals, whatever they are, you need to be on top of WR measurements. When you catch a fish weigh and measure it, write it down, release the fish.
When you're done for the day get online and download WR tables per your species. Do the math. When you've done this a few times you'll be able to hold a fish and come within 5-10% accuracy of it's WR, no more need for charts - you'll become attuned to how a WR 100 BG should feel and appear - same for all other species. You won't need to rely on measurements and charts for long.
Of course this means keeping spare batteries on hand for your scale and a measuring board on the dock. If we don't interpret the data the fishery provides there's no way to manage it correctly. I assume you've invested a lot of time and money on your pond build and development of your fishery, it's worth the effort to learn how to manage it well. WR measurements are an important management tool to help you get there.
TJ, our fishing is too close to chaos to do this. My daughter, her husband, three little ones, and two labs have been doing most of the fishing. I don’t go over and inspect each catch. It’s easy when it’s just me, or a friend and myself, but with the whole crew there, as they have been most of the last two months, it’s not going to happen. I guess you can put me in the category of “not serious” about managing my fishery.
Ordered more optimal feed yesterday. I’ll keep the feeder running.
I’m hoping I have enough YP to keep them sustainable. I can’t tell by watching them feed.
The little guy pictured above is hopefully one of many. I only found two ribbons this spring, but we released what I thought were several females, when caught. Hopefully there were more ribbons present that I just didn’t see. (Maybe too deep).
Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it. I just doubt I can get it done. Since I’m not running aeration, I probably won’t have optimally managed fishery anyway.