Excellent Shawn. You know your stuff.

I agree with you almost entirely. But I still think baitfish populations
can be enhanced in most cases by simply managing the water for them. That
is, provide habitat designed to sustain baitfish, not just bass. I think
the problem often is that the bait has nowhere to hide. If you keep a big,
hungry bass in an otherwise empty fish tank & pour in a dozen baitfish,
he'll have them hanging out of his gills within minutes. Now, add a bunch
of weeds/rocks/etc to that tank & there might be some baitfish swimming
around in a day or two.

Warren
--
http://www.warrenwolk.com/
http://www.tri-statebassmasters.com
2004 NJ B.A.S.S. Federation State Champions



"Shawn" wrote in message
...
Warren : Again, I can see some validity in what you are saying, but I
also
see some problem areas in your theory. In some smaller lakes and ponds,
what you are saying that may be feasible. I guess I don't know where this
tread originated and which waterbody it was referring to - but in most
cases
unfortunately, managing the forage base tends to be a little more
complicated than managing the larger predatory fish.

In most situations, the forage base, be it shiners, dace, minnows etc.,
are
mainly only limited by the amount of predatory pressure put on them. I
know
of small ponds (I'm talking 1/2 an acre) that are just CHOCK full of
golden
shiners. You throw a cast net and get hundreds and hundreds. There are
no
predators in these ponds, save for the occasional great blue heron that
stops by. These species of fish can live just about anywhere, in any
conditions. There's not much limiting their populations except for direct
predation.

It gets a little more complicated when you start looking at bass-bluegill
communities, as even in the face of predation, bluegills can take over a
pond and ultimately become stunted themselves. In those cases, we must
manage for larger predators, and limit harvest of those predators.

Certain species of forage CAN be managed for, mainly by stocking, such as
smelt and shad, in order to increase the forage base for predators such as
bass. However, managers must be very careful in these situations,
especially when you consider native communities and natural balances, as
you've referred to before. In Vermont, someone took it upon themselves to
introduce alewives to a small 600-acre lake, thinking they'd be helping
the
bass population in that lake. This is always dangerous when fisherman
play
Johnny Appleseed with fish. They see the short term gains but don't
necessarily see the long term impacts. Alewives are a dangerous species
in
landlocked situations. At first, fish like smallmouth and largemouth bass
can see some initial growth rate increases due to the sudden abundance of
food. That's what we call "individual level" changes. However, as years
go
on, changes start occurring at the "population level". Alewives are
predators themselves. They just don't eat plankton like other species of
shad. They love fish eggs and fish fry, right after hatching. Alewives
reproduce fast and in great numbers. Soon there are hordes of alewives
roaming the shallows, increasing the mortality rates on bass eggs and baby
bass over what what already there from bluegill, pumpkinseeds etc. They
also compete with the young bass for food. For the first few months of
their lives, baby bass eat plankton. Study after study has shown that
alewives introduced into lakes can drastically deplete plankton abundance
and change the community. Basically, baby bass and every other fish in
the
lake has a harder time finding food. Fish that are primarily planktivores
start to suffer. In this 600-acre lake in Vermont, within 5 years of
alewives getting put in there, there wasn't a smelt to be seen. The
impacts
go on and on. Also - what the short-sighted fisherman neglected to
realize
was that this particular lake flows directly into Lake Champlain. Now
take
the problem and multiply it by 1,000. Alewives in Lake Champlain is a
disaster waiting to happen. I'm not talking about JUST bass. I'm a
fisheries biologist, not a bass biologist, so I research and manage all
species in Vermont. The walleye, lake trout, landlocked Atlantic salmon,
smelt, perch - all potentially could decline.

But I'm straying. Let's just put it this way. All ecosystems have what
is
known as a "carrying capacity" in biological and ecological terms. That
simply means the ability of that system to support a certain biomass of
organisms at all levels of the food chain. It starts at the base - input
of
nutrients - phosphorous, nitrogen etc. That supports the algae, the
plankton, the aquatic plants, the insects, the minnows, and finally all
the
big fish we love to fish for ! We cannot artificially augment one link in
that chain without impacting everything above it and below it. Like
someon
said in this thread - a pond will hold 200 lbs of bass per acre (as an
example - every waterbody is different). That can be 200 one-pounders or
20
ten-pounders. That's a simple way of looking at it, but it works. Those
numbers are based on the carrying capacity of that lake, factoring in all
the chemical, biological, and physical attributes of the lake.

So getting back to fish removal and stunting, we can only work with what
we
have in most cases. And removing some smaller and a even a few bigger
fish
just makes the available food go around futher.

You can't really just "increase" the amount of food (minnows) in a lake,
because that food needs food too. When you add organisms, something else
has to do with less of the resources those newly added organisms are now
consuming.

I've blabbed enough. Your turn.

Shawn



"go-bassn" wrote in message
...
Thanks as always Shawn, it's great to have a real biologist here in
rofb.
My degree's in aquaculture, so I've got a pretty decent history in your
field. I still have nightmares about going into that Organic Chemistry
III
final lol.

Hear me out on this...

Shawn, Ronnie, all - Obviously if you remove some predators the
remaining
prey will be disbursed more generously among the remaining predators.
I'm
in no way denying it.

But you guys are looking at the immediate problem facing, well, you as
bass
fishermen. I'm looking at it on a broader plane. I'm saying that the
root
of the problem isn't related directly to the bass. I'm saying that,
viewing
the whole food chain, that the bass in these lakes are being deprived as
the
result of an insufficient supply of forage. Basically that the
population
of baitfish is the problem, not the population of bass.

Instead of saying "We have too many bass in this lake...", we need to be
saying "What can we do to increase the forage base in this lake?"

I've seen lakes just bubbling with large, healthy bass of both (popular)
species. There is little-to-no harvest, selective or not, on these
waters.
The common denominator these waters have is that they are just loaded
with
baitfish. In your neck of the woods there's lots of those lakes Shawn.
Champlain, George, Erie, Ontario, etc. Just loaded with big, healthy
bass.
Bass that feast at will. These are natural, ancient, well-balanced
ecostystems.

Don't decrease the bass, increase the bait.

Warren
--
http://www.warrenwolk.com/
http://www.tri-statebassmasters.com
2004 NJ B.A.S.S. Federation State Champions



"Shawn" wrote in message
...
Stunted fish are a DIRECT result of an over-populated water body and
removing fish IS the fix. Warren - think about what you wrote.
"Stunted
fish are stunted because they don't have enough to eat and removing
small
bass is nothing more than a temporary fix." If you have a limited
amount
of
food to be distributed amongst say 100 bass, each of those bass will
only
get a certain amount of food - and that amount may not be enough to
grow.
Maybe it's just enough for "maintenance feeding" - just enough to stay
alive, in other words, without the extra protien and nutrition needed
to
metabolize and convert to somatic (body) growth (and increase in
length
and
weight). Now, if you take away 50 bass of those bass and give them
the
same
amount of food, each bass gets a larger share and will be able to grow
ultimately larger.

You're partly right in that removing just the small fish is not
enough.
With a stunted population, a certain portion of that population NEEDS
to
be
removed to allow the food resources to be better distribution to the
remaining population - and the removal should include both large fish
and
small fish. Large fish eat far more food than small fish do, so the
removal
needs to include "some" of the large fish as well to return the water
body
to a more balanced situation.

Most biologists you talk to nowadays will talk about "selective
harvest"
and
a better fisheries management tool over strictly catch-and-release, in
most
situations. There are always exceptions - in slow growing, long-lived
species for instance, like muskie or lake trout. But for most basic
warmwater fisheries, harvesting fish is an integral part of fisheries
management. In 2000, I was sent by my Department to take part in the
Black
Bass Symposium in St. Louis, Missouri that the American Fisheries
Society
and B.A.S.S. put on. It was a 4-day event comprised of bass
researchers,
biologists, and managers, giving presentations and papers on their
research
and management activities from around the US and Canada. A full text
book
has since been published on bass biology and management practices that
came
from this symposium. During the symposium I attended multiple
presentations by bass researchers that basically said in some areas of
North
America, the "catch-and-release" philosophy was almost having the
opposite
effect as people were thinking, in that decreased harvest was
resulting
in
more bass, but smaller in overall size, bordering on "stunting" in
some
populations because of limited food resource availability.

I'll leave it at that. I won't bore people further with bass biology
and
management lessons ......

Shawn
n


"go-bassn" wrote in message
...
I've said it before Ronnie, the overpopulation of small bass on any
lake
is
99% of the time based on an inbalance somewhere in the water's
ecosystem.
The problem of stunted fish generally means that those fish don't
have
enough to eat. Removing small bass is nothing more than a temporary
fix;
It had nothing to do with the cause of the problem & it has no
bearing
on
solving it.

Balanced ecosystems have a way of mainting healthy populations at
all
levels, that's my belief at least.

Warren
--
http://www.warrenwolk.com/
http://www.tri-statebassmasters.com
2004 NJ B.A.S.S. Federation State Champions



"RGarri7470" wrote in message
...
I say turn em all loose.


on some lakes that adds to the problem of overpopulation of small
bass.
Ronnie

http://fishing.about.com