With regard to the fertilization, I do think it would help inhibit growth as long as the bloom is maintained at some minimum secchi. Swingle talked about using fertilization to control weeds. He said it was important to maintain bloom through winter. If there was a late spring float of dying vegetation it was important to curtail fertilization to prevent a fish kill. There seems to be a lot of nutrients in your sediment driving the growth of the pondweed... so I wonder if there is a way to return these nutrients particularly back to the water column without adding any new nutrients.
Something along the lines of stirring them up maybe with a water jet of some making. It would probably add turbidity but as sediment settled if enough nutrients were returned to the water column you might develop a really good bloom. If it worked, you could cycle this every 4 to 6 weeks to prevent sunlight from getting to the bottom of the pond in its deeper portions. This way you wouldn't compound the accumulation of nutrients in the sediment. At this stage, probably all you need to activate a really is good bloom is sufficient ph. I'm just thinking out loud.
An organism that will eat the stuff and then feed your LMB is what would be really ideal. If the pondweed was abundant, the organism would have cover and protection from predation, but as they ate it up they would be exposed to predators. Something like that would take the sediment nutrients and feed your bass. I keep thinking of orconectes species like papershells and northerns. I don't think either is native in your stretch of the woods, however, the northerns are shown to be native the northern regions of the trinity river drainage and the red river. I live in the heart of it but have yet to discover one. This is probably because I haven't spent much time outside DFW. These crayfish tend to use waterways to move where many other species of other genus move cross country from place to place. The northern is a true standing water species well adapted to lakes, ponds, and living with fish. It would take a decent population probably to control the weed and so minimum cover in the form of rock piles (think flat rocks or concrete slabs laced with crevices they can crawl under). There is also the another species of orconectes in Texas now called Faxonius Texanus, the Texas River Crayfish. It is very similar in appearance to the virile (northern) but I don't think they get nearly as large. There is not a lot of information on them but they are native to Trinity, Red River, & Sabine drainages. To control the pondweed, however, you maybe would have to keep a crawdad pond and restock annually when the pond weed was growing but not overgrown. My dad had a crawdad hole, its pretty remarkable the number of crawfish it would grow for bait. Orconectes will create depressions and sometimes shallow burrows but as long as there is cover they do much less of this than do procambaris species (where every female seems to want to dig a hole and seal it when she is carrying eggs). I think the genus orconectes will typically consume more live vegetation than would the procambaris.
It seems like your carp were added last year ... is that right? Were they present during the early spring?
Last edited by jpsdad; 11/14/20 09:49 PM.
