Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Managing for larger crappies

We have a 7 acre pond with BG, LMB, and some BCP. The BG are nice size and exceed standard weight by ~25%. LMB are also healthy weights for length. BCP are skinny and less numerous (I caught one ~10" BCP but around 50 BG fishing last evening). We have been holding off on LMB harvest to hopefully run bass heavy and increase BG weight / growth rate. We have not been feeding at all, and no aeration.

Is there anything we should / can do to give the BCP a better diet? Any way to establish minnows in a bass heavy pond? We really have no compass on management at this point other than running a bit bass heavy. Thanks for your thoughts.

How's your weed/cover situation? Everything I've read and my own experience indicates that establishing a forage base in a BOW that already has top tier predators present in numbers requires some heavy vegetation/cover to have any chance.

I dropped 250k golden shiners in my big pond this spring (slightly smaller than yours) and haven't seen hide nor hair of them since. And I have an OK cover base, but not extremely heavy.

250k golden shiners! Wow - and no sign of them. That's hard to imagine. How many shiners can a bass consume per day?

We have dense chara growth from spring through fall, but it dies back a good bit in winter. Water is generally very clear - usually I can see a white bucket lid on a rope to around 10' or so. Would adding a bunch of X-mass trees help? Some sort of exclusion netting or???

Bass should be called pigfish- they don't stop eating- ever- they will eat everything that they can stuff in their mouth. It is hard to get enough forage for my crappie cause the bass wolf it down before the crappie can get any. I put 100# of fatheads and shiners and they didn't last long

Here is some info.

http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=92447#Post92447 Crappie archive – a lot there


Very hard to have a good pond/lake (under 40 acres) with crappie (black , white or hybrids) as they all overpopulate in time. There is a method but it does not involve LMB and BG. There are exceptions to everything and some ponds do have crappie that seem to do ok with LMB and BG. Problem is we can't so far tell what it is about those ponds that make them work. Here is the archive link on crappie and an excerpt on the plan that seems to be working.

http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=92447#Post92447

From one of the linked threads on Crappie. Now several yeas old. BC= black crappie in this post. Jeff now works with Shawn Banks.

Southeastern Pond Management reports in its client newsletter ( see link to newsletter
http://www.sepond.com/images/news/FishTales/sepondfall07.pdf ) excellent success (so far) with Crappie in Southern ponds. This is the same company that one of our PB Convention speakers (Dr. Jeff Slipke) works for. He also provided the PB Forum through Dave Willis info on SMB in Southern ponds. The newsletter contains an article on that as well.

Back to the article on Crappie. With research from reservoirs on HSB feeding they found what we know that the HSB ate a lot of TShad. They also found that HSB eat a lot of young crappie. With that info they decided to try that application on some test ponds. They started with a clean pond and added TShad , GShiners and FH in the fall. The next spring they stocked BC fingerlings followed by HSB in the fall. Over the next 4 years they saw fast growth among the crappie with little crappie recruitment. No sign of the usual problems with crappie in ponds. They then created more ponds like the first and report that electrofishing results are very promising - slab crappie with no overpopulation and - yes the HSB are doing well. A pic of one of the HSB appears to be about 8 lbs. A pic of one of the crappie looks to be about 1.5 to 2 lbs.

Update - additional info on this idea -

North American Journal of Fisheries Management
Fish Community Response to Hybrid Striped Bass Introduction in Small Warmwater Impoundments
J. Wesley Neal*, Richard L. Noble, and James A. Rice


Results from this study suggest hybrid striped bass may have consumed enough small black crappies to prevent overpopulation without eliminating recruitment. However, further study is warranted using a larger number of ponds and differing conditions. If these results can be replicated, enhancing crappie fisheries while simultaneously creating a hybrid striped bass fisheries would be a favorable alternative to complete pond reclamation.

Lot's of info. I'll dig in to this. Thank you!

One thought that jumps to mind - we have not seen any reproduction of BCP in the pond since we purchased it (two seasons ago). It looks like most of the attention is on overpopulation of BCP. Maybe we stock HSB in quantity if we / when the crappies have a huge recruitment year?

My thinking is if the crappie are thin and in poor shape, I don`t know if they would spawn at all. Improving BC habitat and food would be my first quest. Added plant cover and sunken trees. Establishing a minnow or TFS population, possible underwater or above water night lights to attract insects or baitfish for night feeding BC.

My understanding is it's boom or bust with the crappies. I pretty much saw them disappear in the pond I planted them in. After draining there wasn't one to be found.

I don't recall ever reading a thread where crappie spawning is discussed. Can anybody provide some details on crappie spawning like habitat, depth, nest, etc?

Bill, like BG but in deeper water.

And before bluegill from experience angling.

In the lakes around here, they spawn before the LMB too.

ewest? I thought Jeff Slipke works out of Midwest Lake Management now with Shawn Banks. Also, can you point me toward any report on Hybrid Black Crappie overpopulating in any scenario? All reports I've seen show the opposite and require supplemental stocking of HBCP.

OK - so maybe they just go away. It would be great to have some nice size crappies in the pond, but then again is seems managing just BG / LMB is more doable.

Caught a small crappie Sunday evening - about 5" long. So some recruitment must be happening. Good news I think...

Everything I know about BCP says they spawn dang near before everything else in a normal pond. That's part of the problem as I understand it, the spawn of BCP get a head start on everything else - so the YOY are predacious of most other fish ASAP.

I'm one of the rarities that has managed to have 'balance' - if there is such a thing - my big pond has BG/LMB/HSB/BCP/GSH(in theory)/CC(also in theory)

I'm on year 8 of the BOW and can consistently catch LMB in the 90-100% RWE in most age classes, mature BG and some of the prettiest BCP you have ever seen.

My real focus on preventing overpopulation of the BCP is pretty simple...take out a LOT of them every year. This year's count is looking like it'll finish around 450 or so. We're at 392 so far. I keep fairly extensive creel reports and can be darn near 100% positive of control of the fishing pressure.

True but only as to LMB , BG etc and not for YP , WE , Esox and other cool water fish.

Yep!

Yeah I should've quantified what 'normal' means...in my area the LMB/BG/CC/misc stockings is the norm by a long shot....the only person that has YP and WE in my area that I'm aware of is, well, me. And I'm odd like that.

Ditto!

Do you guys know the normal growth rate of BCP in say a 5 ac pond? Mine have been in almost 2 years and for a while I was catching 10-14" (stockers) and releasing them . Now I catch 7" ones from their first spawn a year later. Haven't seen or caught any larger ones since last fall, just the 7" ones. They look normal not thin.

dlowrance, I just noticed your post. So you are pulling out 400 plus BCP a year from a similar sized BOW. We aren't even close to that, maybe a couple dozen this past year. We need to get a system down to record catches, but I know we are not hitting the crappie anywhere near as hard. Good news is we relocated our floating dock to deeper water, and I've started catching BCP off the end of the dock.

I'm thinking about placing some "Georgia Attractors" at the end of the dock to increase our harvest rate. They did well in this evaluation: http://www.ncwildlife.org/News/Blogs/NCW...ctor-Study.aspx

Anybody have an feedback on these? Other options?

Thanks, Dale

Yeah that's been my recipe for success....I'm averaging no less than 350 adult crappie removed every year for the last 5 or so. And thus far I'm not suffering from any of the issues that the forum in general is worried about...overpopulation, stunting, etc.

Side note - they're delicious and a ton of fun to catch!

Dale How old were your crappie when you started keeping them?

Pat, just curious as to how you fish for em?