Rodney,
I am not countering your facts at all, so don't get that idea. Just an
observation I made one day on the lake. There was a bass near a bed
with its eggs and the bed was surrounded by bluegills, and every time
the bass went to chase off a gill 3 others would dart in and grab the
eggs, pretty much eliminating that entire bed. I wanted to jump in and
maul those gills, but hey, it is nature.

Chris
Rodney Long wrote:
WARREN WOLK wrote:

Why are the crappie a problem???

Crappie over populate a small pond quickly, they feed on the same things
that small bass feed on, and they feed on bass fry. Left unchecked you
will have thousands of little stunted , 4 to 6 inch crappie in a pond,
and just a couple of huge bass. and no small ones coming up. A small
body of water can only support so many pounds of fish, regardless of the
species, unless they are artificially fed, then you have O2 limits that
will only support so many lbs of fish. It all depends on what you want
your lake to produce. You want 80% of the Bio-mass, to be small stunted
crappie, then let the crappie go. It takes years for this imbalance to
occur, but it will happen, especially when you just have one fishermen
harvesting any fish.

You can check this out out at any pond management company, (and some
DNR's) that stock small ponds. They will also tell you how much "total
fish weight" a body of water can support in your area. Perfectly
balanced "ponds" require quite a bit of fish harvesting of all species.
Natural balancing (no fish removed) becomes un balanced after a number
of years, as there is really no way to control the spawn, so you will
have unbalanced results, one way or another, or even back and forth, but
eventually it will get totally screwed up for fishing, and hoping to
catch "any" good sized fish.