johnval1 wrote:

I need advice from the group. I live in a small sub in MI that has a
private 4 acre pond. I am the only person who fishes it. It has bass (a
couple in the 5 - 7 lb range), some yellow bullheads, a whole bunch of
bluegill, a couple small perch, and some good sized crappie. Yesterday, I
even caught a 6" pike. I also caught 4 doz bluegill and a 22 lb snapping
turtle.

Most of the bluegill are quite small. Very few are larger than my hand.

Should I cull the small bluegill from the pond? I seem to recall some
ancient wisdom that says this is a good approach to managing the fish
population. Would this help or hurt the bass population?


If you have that many small Blue gills, your bass population is not over
crowded. If you want to grow big blue gills, then you would want to
reduce their numbers.

Of course one of the 'BIGGEST" problems your pound has is crappie, they
will quickly over populate a small pound, this will indeed help stunt
the growth of both them and the blue gills. I would take out as many
crappie as possible, regardless of the size, that little pond can not
support a crappie population. They reproduce much faster than bream,,
and they eat what small bass eat, reducing you bass fingerlings survival
and growth rates. True, large bass eat small crappie, but large crappie
also eat small bass. You can grow some huge bass in such a lake, but not
many of them, and they could be difficult to catch, due to the amount of
food they have available

Secondly, should I kill the snappers should I catch any more of them? I ,
have no idea what snappers eat.

The snappers eat fish, usually small ones, and not many of them, due to
their method of catching them. A 20 lb snapper could possibly be a
"young" (under 20 years old) alligator snapping turtle (if they live in
your state), they are great table fair , but protected in many states. I
have never known them to greatly reduce a pond's fish population, unless
there are a huge number of them in a pond. They can reach up to 200 lbs
and live hundreds of years.




--
Rodney Long,
Inventor of the Mojo SpecTastic "WIGGLE" rig, SpecTastic Thread,
Boomerang Fishing Pro. ,Stand Out Hooks ,Stand Out Lures,
Mojo's Rock Hopper & Rig Saver weights, and the EZKnot
http://www.ezknot.com