Bill,
My idea for the revamp is to drain the pond and nuke the remaining puddle with hydrated lime, add plenty of rock/gravel/rip-rap, marginal plants, and other habitat as it fills back up, and then begin stocking from scratch (probably would be forage this year, then YP this fall or next spring, and SMB next fall). The pond's built into a fairly steep slope, so with that much fall I've also been considering making a siphon to try to pump out a bit of the silt as the pond is draining.
My training was focused more in statistics and probability, which acknowledges the unpredictability of the real world. I realize there isn't an equation that we can just plug some numbers into and get some answers, especially given that the ecosystems we're playing with having trillions of variables; so I'm not trying to actually calculate anything, rather I'm just trying to understand the broader strokes of the system we're working with in pond management. I used numbers in my conversion examples just to illustrate the concept I was trying to explain.
I know I can turn a 1-minute story into a 1-hour confusing ramble session, so I hope you all pardon me for that. My main reasons for starting this thread were to determine:
1. Most forage fish species are predators/carnivorous, so are there any reasonably available forage species options besides crayfish (because they're illegal in my state) to broaden the food web to include more plant-matter, detritus, etc.?
(1.5. Are scuds likely to maintain a population with only light weed cover and with lots of predators around (like YP, GSH, juvenile SMB)?)
2. In the typical SMB/YP/GSH/FHM pond, does it really make sense to stock such huge numbers of a smaller predator like YP if SMB are your primary goal? Wouldn't the high numbers of YP put extremely heavy pressure on the minnow/shiner forage base, while not really being much larger than a GSH, so not really doing much to increase the size of forage available to larger SMB? Wouldn't this extra link in the food chain just decrease the amount of biomass at the base of the food chain that's one day converted into SMB biomass? Or, do high numbers of YP bring so many other benefits that outweigh their impact on the forage base?
I should note that I'd love to have PK shrimp or LCS as a part of the forage base, so please let me know if you know of any potential source.
