I'm currently expanding my 1/2 acre pond in Maryland to almost 2 acres with a goal of producing trophy bass. Last year when we started taking trees down around the pond we had a major fish kill. (Lob Lolly Pine trees have lots of tannin. Lesson learned.) All of the large bluegill and LMB died. I still have a decent population of BG up to 7" and I'm catching bass between 6 to 9 inches long. My question is - now that the pond size has tripled - should I stock additional LMB and BG or do I let the current fish reproduce normally to fill it up? My main concern is if I stock a lot of small bass that they will get eaten by the current population.
Any thoughts are really appreciated. Thanks. Doug
It depends......................................................................... LOL
You could leave it alone or you could add more fish, but I would NOT add more LMB unless you have proof that the genetics of the LMB in there will not grow your trophy size LMB. With the goal of trophy bass, I would make sure that I had a high population of BG and limit the amount of LMB in there. In new ponds where the goal is trophy LMB, we stock FHM and GSH first at the rate of 30-40 pounds per acre of each minnow species as soon as we know the pond will hold water and there is 4-5 feet of water in it. Then we stock 2,500 BG and 500 RES per surface acre of 1"-2.5" fish, either with the minnows or a few months later, and we only stock 50 fingerling LMB per surface acre.
You don't want a high population of LMB in there because you want the LMB to have as much food as possible. You will need to start removing 20#-25# of LMB per surface acre once the LMB in there are 14" or larger. If yoiu remove BG, only remove the male BG and leave the females in there to spawn.
With your goals, I'd electroshock the pond every two years and have the biologist do a detailed survey on not only the LMB (charting RW's for the varying year class fish) but also check BG numbers. It will be very apparent if a certain year class of LMB is overeating the BG forage, and if that happens you want to concentrate on removing more of those LMB to let the forage base recover.
To grow trophy LMB you have no idea how many pounds of BG each LMB has to eat annually. You will run into carrying capacity issues and correct forage fish size/quantity issues if you don't stay on top of the LMB population.
With the existing population of LMB in there, any fish you stock should be bigger than what they can eat, OR stock the smaller fish at a rate that is 30%-50% greater than the recommended rate to offset their predation of the stocked fish.
All that was said above was said with the assumption that you have the correct amount and location of cover in the pond for the LMB and the forage fish, and the correct habitat to facilitate reproduction of the forage fish in the pond. If you don't have that cover and habitat in the pond, don't think about allocating any $$ resources to stocking fish before you get the cover and habitat in the pond.
