Snipe is "sharp" in his math skills tonight. Yes 25/ac is 17-18 fish for 0.75 acre. Personally I would stock a few extra more like 25 to 35 LMB because we have to remember that about 1/2 of the these stocker bass would be males and would be the slower growing stocked bass. Tests have shown that male LMB rarely ever reach 5 lbs and usually around 3-4 lbs. After the bass had grown for at least one year and during year 2, I would start trying to remove the shorter bass that were being caught. This could reduce the number of stocked bass down to around the 20 per acre and help keep the amount of forage fish still abundant to allow plenty of food for the remaining bass to keep growing.
New experimentation by Solitude Lake Mgmt in VA has found that to grow big bass fast the pond should have biomass of forage far greater than the 10 lbs of forage to grow predators one pound. In this study the results indicated that when all female LMB were stocked at 13" they quickly reached the 5-6lb weights. We should remember that Gaftopsail's pond is in GA where LMB have the potential to reach the 8-10 lb status when the bass are not crowded and ALWAYS have plenty of the correct size of forage food items.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 01/30/21 09:41 PM.
