My forage pond has done really well producing RES fingerlings this year. Just in the last week I have taken out over 300 3" nominal fingerlings with the cast net and it still only takes me about 30 minutes to get a batch of 50. I keep thinking it will slow down but so far if I let the pond sit for a day and come back and cast the net, there still seems to be plenty of fingerlings. I get an average of 6 or 8 per cast. Sometimes as few as one or as many as 15. I get the best casts right next to the shore line in a couple feet of water.
I have also been getting just a few 1" long fish. I'm pretty sure they are also RES but I do not put them into my RES pond because I don't want to take the chance on anything I can not positively identify. They are actually too small to stay in the cast net (they could swim right through the mesh) so the fact that I'm accidentally dragging a few up tells me I had a late RES spawn or perhaps a spawn from young, newly mature RES adults and there are likely lots more of them in the pond.
I've decided to catch all I can and remove them to reduce the biomass in the tiny 1/20th acre pond. All the excess I will put in my main pond which only has a very small population of RES. If some of them get eaten, so be it. But some will likely survive beings I have so many BG for my LMB to eat.
