Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain Musings on Optimizing the Food Chain

Thanks Snipe, will do.

Ladies and gents, I can delete any reference to the word "math" if need be, because it somehow has become a huge distraction. I have yet to actually do any math, or even try to calculate anything. Just the mere mention of the word "math" seems to make people anxious and lose their minds. I only used the oft-cited '10 lbs of forage to produce 1 lb of predator' in an example, a principle from biology that is thrown around here on a daily basis. I know that isn't exact, and I don't give a care in the world if the ratio is exactly 10:1 on loss of biomass at each trophic level, or 8:1, 4.89:1, or 5397:1. I'm not at all trying to actually calculate or predict biomass.

I was simply trying to illustrate with an example that having a shorter food chain could possibly, maybe result in a higher standing crop of apex predator per acre, so why purposely lengthen the food chain by adding tons of intermediate/small predators? I just want to get people's thoughts on that idea. Could someone please address this, instead of the fact that I once studied math/statistics in college?

(As a side note, I specialized in statistics/probability, so I'm in tune with the random nature of the real world. My early career was based on cleaning up after the 2008 financial crisis, which was largely caused by faulty calculations/models, and then I worked in explaining why financial models created by some literal rocket scientists couldn't accurately predict the real world observed numbers, so I don't think it'd be arrogant to say I'm more aware than anybody you'll meet of the limits of the calculations of even a horde of geniuses.

But, I'd also maintain that these predictions/estimates, when made even decently well, are much better than a world without any estimates. At least they give us an idea of which direction things are likely to move (increase vs. decrease) when we take a certain action, so we can take better actions that are more likely to have a good outcome. No sense in wasting a ton of time and money just throwing random stuff into the pond when we do have some general ideas of how some things usually affect others. Using the example of this thread, I'm not trying to predict SMB biomass. I'm merely saying, "Do we think the number of a smaller/intermediate predator stocked (like YP) affects the standing crop of apex predator (like SMB) that a pond can produce?".)