JP, what do you mean by "Though it is possible standing weights would be comparable either way"?
If I leave the berried females in the pond until the youth are on there own (third instar as I have learned) and those YOY get eaten, all the while trapping out the males and non-berried females...my standing weight should go down. That is my goal after all.
Probably would go down but maybe not as much you may think. The water is capable of sustaining a limiting weight of crayfish. So if you divide that weight by the maximum potential growth by fall (for a typical individual) ... then you have the number of crayfish it would take to fill out the carrying capacity at the maximum weight per individual. Brown et al. were able to grow northerns to 700 lbs/acre in an unfed-unfertilized pond in 5 months. Their size at the end of the season of course depends on the number of juveniles stocked in the spring. So stock too many, they will reach that limiting weight sooner and only grow by attrition (usually by cannibalism of molting crays). So as you can imagine, there is a goldie-locks stocking rate that allows the crayfish to grow maximally until harvest. When the numbers are below this, production will decrease. So it all depends on survival, but this much I will mention. Crayfish can produce way ... way more offspring than is required to replace themselves. As long as a sufficient number survive they could fill the carrying capacity or replace their spring standing weight of adults by fall.
****Bump****
If you delay removing crayfish until the middle of May ... almost all of the females will have released their young or be berried with eggs or young. In other words, if you would like to retain all the YOY delaying the removal of crays until then would ensure very few inseminated females would slip through the cracks. This would maximize your YOY production. Those taking your crayfish home in this case ... would have to wait until next year in order to get YOY production (though small percentage could produce a second brood ... but this would be the exception and not the rule).
