Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations What the H--- do I do now?

First, I must strongly recommend that if you are going to invest TIME & MONEY to adust the fish populations in your pond, start by doing & recording RWs! You will not know if the changes that you do make are having the desired effect. If I had done so, I would have saved myself a good deal of time & money.

I thought, I understood what my over LMB populated pond needed to bring things back into balance & how to do it. No LMB had been removed in 20 years the Rws were 75% & lower. Strange that my records showed that I have caught 40 LMB in the past year & I never caught a LMB smaller than 12". I have used some bait that 8-11" fish would consume. In fact the records show a slot 12-15" that the LMB were in, only a few above 15".

Reading examples of possible recruitment in a pond in another post by jpsdad, the light switch came on: I have VERY few juvenile LMB. There is no healthy bottom to the LMB pyramid size structure. There are no juvenile fish to replace the fish I have removed. Instead of 50-60 LMB to the acre I had perhaps 20 adult only. I now understand why fishing has become so unproductive.

It appears that I have probably removed enough LMB from the pond? Fish only to gain the RWs, to see if they are increasing or if there are some 8-11" LMB?

Next Spring add some LMB fingerlings? Wait till the following Spring, as the forage fish populations will have increased greatly?

Or continue as is, let the proper LMB populations recover by them selves, continue to monitor RWs?

Your comments & suggestions are greatly appreciated

JE - Curious on a few items.

Size of the pond/lake?

Age of the pond/lake is 20+ years.

My guess, and I am no pro is that the RW's of the LMB will improve as the forage increases. Your existing population likely has lost some of their possible top end weight but there isn't any reason why they won't continue to grow or the RW's of them won't improve. As the LMB spawn...these are the guys you want to protect as they haven't lost their possible top end gains - IE...this is a multi year project that will will continue to harvest against to promote the best fish in the pond and cull the others. Perhaps a slot limit is the way to go here with allowing the spawn, and protecting the top end that you have now until you reach your numbers of culled or #'s per acre annual goals. That slot could be adjusted at any time as you start to see performance changes.

If there was a desire to introduce some new genetics in the pond, either stocking fingerlings ahead of the LMB spawn (there will be some mortality/predation here for sure) or stocking larger fish that won't be eaten with only a few extra mouths in the water. If the symptom is low RW and the cause of it is lack of forage I don't think I would add additional LMB in. I might however see what my forage base looks like.

What species are available to the LMB to eat?

Can I bump these numbers up?

Is there an additional forage species I could add that will help?

Might be some other opinions out there, but this is where I would start personally. Great to see you are tracking your fish so you can monitor your efforts and how the fish are responding for sure!

Do YOY LMB have adequate cover to survive predation and grow into adults?

Also, I wonder how much LMB need to be restocked over time. I'm thinking that we should restock LMB more often than we think.

The 3-acre pond for those 20 years had little to no structure/vegetation for the YOY to hide. I believe this is the reason that year after year the pond has lost most all of its YOY both LMB & BG. I have adult BG >5" but very few forage fish <5". I posted because my concern is that without the juvenile classes & I have removed 40 adult LMB; I may have as few as 20 adult LMB left in the pond. From my fishing experiences perhaps less.

The pond now has vegetation border around most of the pond, 6-10', wide in some areas. There appears to be a greater abundance of BG this summer but that is just a SWAG. On a foolish whim, I tried stocking tilapia once again. We will see how that turns out. In years past it has been a waste of time & money.

I have done some LMB RW reading within the forum & I am now leaning towards waiting till Spring '26 to stock some new LMB genetics & continue to monitor the RWs. The summer of '25 will be a recovery year for the BG, if all goes as planned.

I see.

Not if you don't add cover for the fish. You need to have roughly 3/4 acre of cover in there from shallow to deep water. No cover = marathon runners for LMB and no place for the BG to hide to avoid predation to grow bigger.


Look, LMB need the correct AMOUNT of food to eat, in the correct SIZE to continue growing. The only way to do that is to have cover in there for the fish to utilize to hide and to grow. Angling can only show you so much, fish that won't bite don't get sampled. A 14" LMB needs BG 3"-4" long. A 20" LMB needs BG that are 5.5"-7" in length to continue to grow. Without the correct cover in the pond that flat out ain't going to happen.

I'd get an electroshock boat in there to do a sample and go off those numbers. You need to see the fish that you aren't catching.

YES, you need new genetics in there, but without the correct cover there is a great possibility that the fingerlings that you stock will be eaten.

What is your easiest go to structure?


These are some of our 5-gallon buckets that we turned into structure with some left over PEX piping




pretty cheap and easy to make

Add a vertical component your structure and you will really have something.

+1 on some vertical structure. Maybe something that sticks up just above the surface.

I also like it to mark your heavy horizontal structure for fishing. I would throw a Texas-rig plastic worm over that stump and hop it through. If full pool puts 5' of water over that structure, then I would only try to get a crankbait down 4' when casting to that spot. It is nice to know exact locations, even if you are just casting a bobber for kids. Pro tip: kids enjoy waiting while you take fish off the hook, they don't enjoy it as much when you have to re-tie fishing gear after getting snagged.

I do NOT know about unwanted birds using the top of structure that is just above water level. If you use something like a vertical trunk from a small tree, perhaps drive a piece of rebar in the top so it is a terrible perch?

+1 , on kids and waiting. Would recommend tighter , fluffier cover for fry and fingerling to escape predation.

What do you use for your "fish concentrators" in your commercial fishing ponds?