Ok Guys, I went out an fished for the first time a 2 acre NW Missouri pond this A. M. Pond is said to be 11 years old. Deployed 2 bait fish traps for 2 hours. Caught no bait fish. Caught 50 to 60 LMB all 6" to 10" long. All looked more like marathon runners instead of weight lifters. Clearly a severe case of no forage base and under harvest. Questions : are these bass all stunted and not candidates for relocation to other waters or are they just young ones? Will stunted fish "come out of it" if moved to a good forage situation or once a runt, always a runt? At what length of the fish do you decide it is stunted and should become racoon food?
No bait fish, loads of small bass. Honestly, I suspect most of the bass are stunted. Put them in a better environment and they may grow some, but likely will never make up the growth they missed. Probably lots of them are older fish, you can sometimes tell if they have large eyes for their body size.
In this situation, usually best to just take out almost every LMB while working hard to stock & feed panfish to establish forage base. Or even poison or drain the lake & start over right.
Fish em remove em and add BG till it turns around, my neighbors 25 acre pond was out of balance like that and a year later it’s much better, not perfect but noticeably better. Depends on your pocket book to some degree
Very interesting reading Eric, thanks for posting
You know...I have seen a couple of ponds that were full of stunted bass like what is described in the OP, but I never ever thought about the age of a given fish in a pond in terms of whether they could recover if given more forage.
Without knowing that though...we fished the seemingly endless supply of 10" bass down as aggressively as we could and added some BG and it worked to help bring things back into balance.
Dave_IA, your experience speaks that its never too late and always worthwhile to get started managing LMB by harvest.
That’s what I need to do , remove plenty of LMB and thousands of BG......