Originally Posted By: esshup


True, but I remember a post by someone named ewest that said that they'd never seen a BG stunt in a pond that had LMB in it. wink

Am I disallusioned in thinking the following?

I can always add LMB to a pond to take care of too much forage. I will have a harder time getting a pond into balance if it is full of stunted LMB with not enough forage. This is without having an electroshock boat, seine or rotenone available.


I don't recall that but there are a lot of northern ponds I have not seen. Dave Willis has posted that as the suggested northern stocking plan. It is also contained in several of the northern pond mgt books. That is because of the results that occur if a standard BG first plan is used in many northern ponds. You end up all to often with stunted BG and no LMB recruitment as a result. Studies show that LMB will not attempt to spawn if the effort is futile , such as when BG overcrowding is present.


Both out of balance states (BG overcrowding or LMB overcrowding) are equally hard to fix. The idea is to use the method that gives one the best chance of success. Probably easier to add adult BG and remove LMB to fix LMB overcrowding than to fix BG overcrowding because if you put in enough LMB to reduce the BG with their high reproductive rate you will soon have the opposite result. Either way it is hard to maintain a balanced state teetering between 2 naturally occurring unbalanced probabilities.

Last edited by ewest; 09/21/10 11:00 PM.