Pond Management

[eastenfish]

Ok guys I think I know what to do but give me your opinion. Got a small farm pond I would guesstimate at 1/4 acre. It's about 80 yards long and 30 or so wide. Species consist of LM, bluegill, a few 10 lbs or so catfish, and 3 monster grass carp. The pond was doing great till about 2 years ago. My uncle allowed some people to come in and harvest a few fish to eat. Well they took this and ran with it. They made atleast 3 trips and filled a large igloo cooler full of bass and bluegill. They were taking a lot of 2 lb and up bass. My uncle ran them off after this. Well fishing was tough for a year and now this year all the bass are extremely small. I haven't caught anything over 2 lbs all year. The bluegill in the pond are extremely large. There are 8+ inch bluegill all over this pond. My question is do I need to take out some of the small bass or do I need to take out some of the large bluegill. This pond has always managed itself well in the past and fish were healthy. Now the bass seem stunted and some even in poor health.

Advice??? I used to catch some really good bass out of this pond (3 lb +) on a regular basis and I would like it to return to this status.

[brwnbass]

Probably a little of both.The bluegills will eat the bass eggs & fry & if there are too many small bass they cant all get enuff to eat.I would also try to put in another type of forage for the bass, crawfish or minnows. I wouldnt mind gettin rid of those 'gills for ya!!!

[eastenfish]

Thanks. I probably didn't pose my mental problem well enough. I think the majority of the bass population is too small to eat the extremely mature bluegill population. Therefore causing a lack of food for the bass. So will thinning out the bass be better to allow them to grow or thinning out the bluegill population? I guess I should've made a poll.

Don't want to add minnows. Can't remember the type of minnows people put in the pond. But I've heard from several people that the minnows multiply quickly and are a great forage for the bass. However, the bass stay full and they become extrememly hard to catch. I want a healty population but not stuffed and gorged.

[rusty50576]

i would keep all those big bream and leave the bass alone for a year or two. In a small pond like that, you dont want to keep many bass. If you have a trophy pond its ok to kill some smaller bass but 1/4 of an acre, i would say leave the bass alone for a while and thin the bream

[MTBROWNING]

I agree take the Bream,leave the bass alone.A plus is Bream eat great.

[softbaitmaker]

Bluegills are very agressive to bass beds and if the blue gills are to big the smaller male bass cannot protect the beds you bass population will suffer. I would begin removing as many big gills as possible and putting them in a frying pan. The eco system it to lop sided right now. You must also remember that big Gills with eat the same food chain as the smaller bass do so they may be hurting to small bass food chain also. Remember Bass don't raid Bluegill beds so the gills can get out of control much faster. Invite a few buddies and their families up for a fish fry and ya'll go down to the pond and thin out the Gills. Do that a couple times a summer and things should get back to normal. Remember to focus on keeping more big Female gills than males also. I had a buddy build a pond about 1 acre and he bought 50 female gills and three males and in 5 years he had Bluegills over running the pond which was fine with him and his family cause they loved eating gills. He added Flathead cats later to help control the Blue Gill populations.

[akeck]

There's a small pond out in the middle of the woods on our neighbor's property. It's just a little bigger than what you described. I haven't been to it this year, but when I first started going to it when I was 13 it was exactly like what you described fish-wise. It's a hard walk through cedar thickets and briars.. about 3/4 mile over ridges. So, I haven't been a whole lot since I got my license lol. But anyways, it had a few catfish over 10, a bunch of bluegill, a bunch of smaller bass, and about 3 or 4 big grass carp. I always wanted to catch bigger bass out of it when I was little so I tried to manage it because it had been abandoned and still is. I read online a lot about it, and I decided to thin out the bigger gills. I used minnows and t-rigged worms to kind of "assess" the bass population and size. I ended up thinning out a few of the smaller ones - I really tried getting the stunted bass out too. I did that for that one year.. it only took a handful of trips to thin out most of what I thought I needed to. That little pond was streamfed so it had some forage - but, I didn't see too many minnows. So, I went below my house and trapped some creek minnows and turned lose a ton of them in there. I believe it was 3 or 4 years later, but it made a ton of progress. It went from a few big gills and just a handful of 1 - 1 1/2lb bass to a small population of really good sized gills and a good number of 3lbish bass. I always thinned out the bass and gills each year afterward, but at a really small rate. After about 5 or 6 years, I started catching a 5lber here and there and saw more up on beds. I'm not sure what it's like now - but the last time I went I saw some decent size bass swimming near the surface.. but I believe it's about over populated though. I believe that pond was 1/2 - 3/4 acre now that I think about it - the same thing should work with your pond though. Like I said, I didn't do much but try to thin out the population some and added a bunch of creek minnows. I know thinning them out helped a lot, but I'd say the addition of forage probably helped as much or more. I also put some tree's in the pond so the bass fry and minnows would have places to stay safe at. I figured the forage I added would just be like feeding goldfish in a aquarium if I didn't give them a good place to hide at.

I'm no expert or anything, but what I did helped that pond out a lot. I remember a decent bass out of it to begin with was maybe 14" and it went up a lot after that. I added a couple of females in the 2 1/2 lb range too that first year. I'm guessing that helped some too.