Glad to hear that it might not be a total blank slate!
If your family does catch some of the large HSB this fall from your other ponds, are you planning to re-stock a few back into the RES/SMB pond?
I would hate to see the entire current size class of RES and SMB all grow bigger without ANY predation. I think there is a chance they could consume all of the forage in their preferred consumption size.
(Just throwing out some wild speculations since you certainly know more about that topic than I do.)
Are you going to throw out some hand feed in that pond this fall? That might give you some rough visual sampling to observe the size and species of the fish that survived.
