Snrub, do your small catfish (under 14 inches) compete with your gills for the forage in the pond? I kinda assumed juvenile catfish would eat the same foods as bluegills.
I never really thought about it. I suppose they do.
We remove whatever CC we catch, no matter the size. To date we really have not had a problem of too many CC or too little. Guess we have just been lucky so far. I think we have filleted 38 CC so far this year to date and have a half dozen in the holding pen to clean this morning. If we did not aggressively harvest I think they would become a problem. We are aggressively harvesting CC and HBG ahead of the hot season to reduce the bio load on the pond and give room for the remaining fish to grow. We have already harvested over 200 sunfish this year with very few of them actually being BG and mostly naturally occurring HBG and a few GSF. We return about all the male BG that we catch and the best looking female. That may change in the future but with our LMB population recovering and the SMB that we introduce to the main pond I will have to start paying more attention to BG recruitment.
With our increased LMB population I wonder if in a few years we will run out of CC recruitment. Wife really likes eating the CC. But we like LMB too so I don't have a problem one way or the other if the CC eventually go by the wayside. We will just start filleting LMB if they become plentiful. We are starting to occasionally catch last years spawn LMB. Been a few years since we could do that because the high population of BG/HBG were presumably preventing LMB spawns. We are getting LMB spawns now.
More information than you ask for!!!!
