QA, dare I say I feel your pain.
I want to add a thought to something you said above about your RES.. A year and a half ago I had a high flow event that caused massive amounts of flow around my emergency spillway. Being fairly flat on the true plains of western KS, the area downstream of my pond is pasture, literally for miles. Within about 2 weeks the water had soaked and I made my way around most of the low spots of grass containing small pockets of water as they dried up. I found about 65 dead adult RES, 1 SMB of about 6" that was actually still alive in a very small pool and I moved that fish back to my pond. I found nothing else dead or alive other than a few minnows.
I've been taught/told for the last 30 years that most fish tend to hunker down and stay put.. I believe for the most part that is true, but last spring during a heavy snow melt with hard frozen ground, we had a big flow-through again. Not the gusher I had the year before but big water movement. Again in those same pasture areas I found mostly dead RES adults and did manage to move a few live ones back to pond. A very small number of other fish, mostly the RES.
In my fall 2020 net samples I did not get 1 big adult RES, nothing over 4".
I strongly believe RES want to go with the flow. THAT could be what happened to some number of your RES, maybe..
I know you've had turbidity issues for some time, I know you have a large Craw population.
You mention fish in the 80% WR range..Those will never achieve anything significant and should be removed.
I may have opposition here but I think when you see fish dropping below 95%, there's something that needs to change going forward.
20-30 HSB @ 3-4lbs and 10 2lb'ers in 1/4 ac are going to flat clean house which leaves no obvious overabundance of anything left. HBG, F1-F2, on.. leaves nothing with reproductive capacity to fill the needs of everything remaining-in my mind..you've got 100+lbs in HSB biomass tied up... in .25 acres.
This might be a good time to go into reset mode.
Think it through, search your goals again. It's easy to add more species to try and make up for what we wanted to work and didn't-I've been there.
You didn't really ask but I'd start removing fish by angling methods, targeting HSB. See what happens to your panfish population/size structure by next fall or the following spring then revisit your options.
