Fish Habitat planning

hey mr pond balls tell me what to do to make all my lover-like dreams come true hello everybody bob loves the pond boss coming at you live wednesday here at pom boss world headquarters in beautiful uh gordonville texas haven't been hanging around here a whole lot but i've been hanging around here some i see uh jason nip's dad's already checking in of course we knew he would got to talk to jason today i'm going to share a little bit of that conversation with you here just for a second now bear with me i got a little raspy throat going on but i i've got some cough syrup let's see bill robinson billy bates what's up bob i think a lot of stuff up it's crazy man it's um when people ask me how i'm doing i tell them i'm leading a pretty cool life how about you because i do live a really cool life mike catrell there's kim moore hey kim how you doing mike's i don't know if he's hanging around tarrant county or palopena county i bet he's in tarrant county there's veto olavito bill monica hey buddy now there now this guy's a sunfish angler right here he's a um a great musician and an even greater angler or maybe he's not maybe he's a better musician troy todd good to see you buddy billy bates good gosh we got a good group showing up already danny max here look at there tony and lil bennett happy wednesday we cannot wait to get our pond building i can't wait for you man my controllers got in from dropping off dave davis's deer head oh that's so cool i love dave davidson he's he and i go way way way back we first met cow had to be in the late 1990s probably anyway he's got property near bowie texas there's trey carpenter from down around burnet texas checking in devon thompson hey devon chris arthur steve scanlon from pister i know where pister is mineral wells hey who knew that right brock wren hey brock good to see you buddy debbie and i've been staying in a hotel in allen texas for a few days and a couple of nights she she kind of cranked down the air temperature in the room a little bit and dried it out and i slept with my mouth open and now i have to pay for it brock got 750 pounds of crawfish in his 10 acre lake that's good looks like most got smoked well that means bats are hungry jennifer reeves hey from over there walnut creek i know right where that is that's right over there right around the corner john funk april michigan you can't beat it snow in the forecast for thursday yeah it'll be 75 the day after there's dustin crawley i got to talk to jason nebstad today and uh i don't know probably three years ago four years ago i was in that neck of the woods he's over there in fayetteville north carolina and he lives on about 120 530 acre lake and they were getting ready to draw the lake down and he wanted to go in and analyze the fishery before they drew the lake down and see what they could do to make the fishery better so uh made a big circle through the united states got the electric fishing boat over there spent time with him and one thing that really jumped out at me about that lake was it was sorely missing some habitat well while we were there we collected all the data to map the bottom of the lake and uh justin stein fischer's biologist put the map together and got a bottom bathymetry map they call it and there's a fancy word for you but symmetry where basically it it creates the contours of the bottom of the lake so one of the things that jason wants to do is improve the habitat so our discussion was he says i want to sit down with you look at the map together and let's figure out how to create a habitat plan so when i'm thinking about a habitat plan the what goes through my mind is is we want to have we want to create an underwater community for our fish now if you're a bass angler to you that means you want to get some congregation points where bass can come together and you can catch them well to me i know it takes and you all know this y'all know this how many pounds of bait fish does it take for a bass to gain a pound ten that's right so if you're not providing habitat for those fish that are your forage fish you're getting behind so we know that fish need a place to spawn and different species of fish spawn different ways a bass falls differently than bluegill bluegill spawns differently than a threadfin shed threadfin shed spawn differently than a gizzard shad which spawns differently than a red air sunfish so we need to know how all those fish reproduce provide that for them that's part of the habitat the second part of the habitat is when a baby fish is first hatched from its egg it's not very big like a little baby bluegill is this big t-90 little squirt 12 000 of them weigh one pound so our job is if we can keep them alive for 45 days they're 30 per pound so you do that by providing them places that they can hide and congregate and get away from whatever wants to eat them at that moment you know so we can keep them live a little bit longer if we keep them live a little bit longer they're a better food source you know and then there's uh the intermediate sized fish you know the three to five inch bluegills six to eight inch bass 10 to 12 inch bass 14 to 16 inch bass you know seven and nine inch bluegill so we want to create the kind of habitat that allows those fish to thrive now the problem with a lake that's 125 acres it's is gonna be it takes about 20 to 30 percent of a lake bed covered with a variety of habitat elements to create the communities to influence the productivity of that lake now when i say the word productivity it means to grow more fish than it would without all those elements well the thing about a lake that's that big you know it'll cost 150 000 dollars to go create all that habitat if it wasn't created when the lake was built so when i'm talking jason it's as much about how do we congregate the fish that are there to make them a little easier to catch as we improve the productivity over a long period of time so what i told jason was to look at the contours of his bathymetry map and on and and print the map out and take a marker crayola uh map colors and mark on the map where you catch the most fish or if you've got one of those newfangled depth finders that show you the fish mark that on the map mark it exactly where you catch those fish or where you mark those fish and you're going to find that it's only going to be about 10 percent of the lake on any given day and then take that 10 percent of the lake and improve it first whether you're buying moss back fish attractors you're adding brush piles rock piles entire reefs whatever it is you're going to do you know create and and implement and um enhance those and i label those as a zones so i want to work on the a zones first they've already proven to be good places to fish make them better if you do that you're going to attract more fish then over a long period of time you can create enough underwater habitat structure cover to actually make the lake more productive so that's kind of where we went there with that let me see here you only have to put up with my coffin tonight sorry throat's dry i do have some cough syrup there we go let me see here who we got okay andy eddings from signal mountain tennessee john funk yep dustin crawley matt marsden listening from the houston fishing show matt marsden is the american fish tree habitat guy check out american fish tree uh friend since matt's watching the show you can find him right here friend him and talk to him about artificial habitat that's what he's doing over there at the houston fishing show right now let's see i see ron arduin good to see him oh gosh i forgot to do the little commercial thing holy cow everybody that watches this show all the time you guys know what to do click like share it to your timeline put hashtag ponboss magazine in the comments section you will be eligible for a drawing for a pond boss hat and a ponboss mug and danny mack's going to say it i know he's already said it so is ron you know all you guys that watches you know pom-box mug that knows how to keep hot things hot cold things cold we don't know how it knows but it does do those three things hashtag pomos magazine click like share to your timeline you're eligible for a drawing for all that good stuff now pom boss 39 no not 39. 35 bucks a year i guess i can raise the price i own it 35 bucks a year six issues cheaper than a friday night date and it lasts a lot longer hey you know what we got our resources guide out they're free um to give you more resources you can go to pondboss.com we have all these videos archived there uh we've got other videos the pomboss.com discussion forum called ask the boss you know by the way for those of you that don't know last wednesday i launched the bob lusk institute of higher pondology online courses and uh i'll put up the uh i'll put up a link later on unless one of you guys has it if one of you guys have it post that link it's i think pondboss.teachable.com i think that's what it is harrison davis good to see you the man the legend paul was harrison i don't know if you got to watch the show last week but guess what you won a palm boss hat you won the drawing last week dude so leanna said she hadn't shipped it she'll be doing that here pretty quick so anyway been talking a little bit about habitat i'm trying to lubricate my throat travis small smith are you going to the houston fishing show dude i know you're in that neck of the woods todd austin frank james hey big mon hey big money mike mcpherson good evening from indiana i just want to say thank you for all you do you're welcome i feel like a pig on roller skates but you know what you step on those real estates long enough you'll be chasing all the other pigs and running away faster than they are tony lawrence you got it my bass gather at suppertime says john funk it's fun to watch them pick it line the edge of the pond waiting there you go frank james aqua max 300 400 finally came into the piranha store good news for my young of the year bluegill in the forage pond travis paul smith got his texas hunter feeders loaded up those are two of our really important sponsors and it's and it's not so much that they buy advertising i think that's great but more importantly they cater to our industry they they they create products that make our ponds better you know you guys that watch the show all the time you've heard this story but i got to start working with purina mills back in 1995 and it you know they bought they bought the inside front cover of the magazine they've got that every ish every issue there it is right there they've got that ad and they also have the back cover well that helps fuel our economy but the thing that really struck me the most was when they looked me right in the eye at hammond's barbecue in glen rose texas in 1995 they said you know what yeah we want to buy an ad but what can we do to help this industry we see this industry as a burgeoning industry it's in its infant stages and we want to do what we can to help so we started talking about i just threw out there i said you know what we uh we keep feeding different sizes of different species of fish and that might be bluegill this big or this big or channeled catfish this big or this big and we can only buy one size of fish food i think you can maybe create different pellet sizes oh my gosh it was like a palm to forehead moment they looked at each other there were three of them and it wasn't two weeks later i had a pallet of unmarked bags and that's where game fish chow was born well that was in 1995 so game fish chow hit the market because of a conversation with some guys from purina eating ribs on butcher paper with sawdust on the floor now tell me that's not real that's as real as it gets so as time went on they had the aquamax lineup of fish foods that they wanted to improve those so i got to work with dr mark griffin who was their nutritionist back then to develop some of the feeds that they used to this very day and not only did they develop the feeds they spent time over time over the years making them better changing the vitamin package changing the fat improving the uh nutrient load uh figuring out the fish meal was it that's the very best protein now i read something on a facebook page upon page today where a guy was complaining about paying 46 bucks for a bag of fish food well i get that sticker shock sure who wants to pay 46 for a 50 pound bag of anything you know except gold but here's the difference they you're you're you're carnivorous fish like bluegills largemouth bass under feed train hybrid stripers you know those kinds of fish that are carnivores they have to have meat to gain weight well this fish food they converted like one point two or one point three to one now perrin doesn't like me saying that because their feed trials where the fish only eat fish food is not quite that good it's like 1.4 but the feed trials that i've done 1.2 to 1.3 knowing that there's also some natural food in these ponds out here that i did the feed trials on now here's something else it's when i'm feeding these this fish food to these bluegills not only did the bluegills get bigger but they have a lot of babies so i might start off with a thousand bluegills in a trial and end up with 15 000 bluegills at the end of the trial so how do you figure all that out you know but here's what i know is is those fish get larger grow faster have more babies because that fish food at 46 bucks a bag is doing that for them and they're not getting that out of a out of a uh grain-based fish food sack they're not and then texas hunter been a long time friend of those guys i love their products i love their fish feeders i love their deer blinds they make a lot of cool stuff but their feeders will throw that fish feed 40 feet out in a straight line fish can't say no to that you know also uh david schneiderman easy docks of texas he's a he's a sponsor of this show as is greg grimes with aquatic environmental lakework.com okay look at there here look at that here comes david ewald david ewald's also got now david doesn't buy an ad from me but we're going to forgive him for that for this moment he should buy an ad he knows it but he's posting this thing up here and i usually delete those but david i'm going to cut you a little slack tonight so you can get in here and compete if you guys want to take a look at what david's doing and david you need to buy an ad that's all i'm going to say about that but i'm going to leave your post up and let people take a look at it because you've been in the industry a long long time and and your products stand on their own merit let's do it that way david ewald's products stand on their own merit all right lookie here mark hicks good to see you jeff thompson why does blue green algae slow down the activity of bass feeding um by the way jeff is one of the guys one of the early birds that bought into the bob lusk institute of fire pondology and jeff i appreciate that i saw that and uh i'm going to be sending you a uh palm boss hat i've got leanne queued up to do that but to answer your question i'm not convinced that blue green algae slows down the activity of bass feeding i think it's coincidental because typically when a pond has blue-green algae the temperatures are going up and bass are seeking a thermal refuge now if that's going on now i don't necessarily think those two things are related now what blue green algae does is let's let's do it let's go to school on that for a few minutes blue green algae is caused by an imbalance between nitrogen and phosphorus in the water and it's because of the blue-green algae which is actually a bacteria it's not an algae at all it's because they are out competing all the good algaes and the good plankton and it's because of the circumstances the circumstances are the right temperature a nutrient imbalance could be the temperature rose or the temperature fell and and knocked out those better algaes in plankton that compete with blue greens but the circumstances are where the blue greens can glu can grow now those may be the same circumstances that disrupt bass's behavior but it's not a symbiotic or it's not a mutually exclusive cause for one over the other so that's the answer i'm gonna give you there mike mcpherson jennifer reeves you guys know the drill mark hicks cheaper than a friday night date yeah help come on dude 35 bucks i took debbie to bj's which is a brewery over there in allen we're staying in a hotel over there i spent 42 bucks for lunch that was an appetizer soup and salad uh and we each had a glass of wine for lunch which we don't do that very often but that was like 48 bucks it was gone gone adios like see it 35 bucks and i promise you you'll get a nugget out of each one of these issues and some of you will get two nuggets and others will get more so there's my commercial for the moment let's see here billy bates i sent you a couple of picks and an email oh yeah okay yep yep yep i'm seeing these eye worms and flukes in about 10 of my young of the year bluegills pretty crazy parasite with this life cycle which involves snails plant increased shell crackers in my pond to help help eat more uh oh uh oh holy cow i'm getting behind i'm gonna have to catch up okay so billy i'm trying to read the rest this what else can be done okay all right you know what okay billy bates what happens is there's these worms these flukes the the primary hosts are and actually there's um grubs yellow grubs and black grubs snails are the primary host and so what happens is the snails host the parasite why do you have snails answer that question and you'll have your answer for the long term when you have snails you have usually have abundant vegetation sometimes too much vegetation snails will thrive reproduce grow feed and just do really well in patches of aquatic plants so if you can minimize the you don't want to do away with aquatic plants but the reason you want shell crackers is because they eat snails so they go in there and they disrupt the life cycle of these parasites by eating the snails which is the primary host what happens is the circaria that's two big words in one one broadcast break loose or hatch from the snail free swimming attached to a fish and the ones that billy's talking about these snails they they'll they'll come in the back of the eye of the of the especially bluegills i've seen them in bluegills several times actually many times and then they'll burrow their themselves into the eye and then they'll start forming they'll just start growing really big well you can take a pair of tweezers and pluck them out of the eye i've seen i've seen those dead gum round worms like that that long coming out of it i have a bluegill that was this big what else can be done is manage the aquatic plants and be sure that you have survival rates of your of your shell crackers which are also called red ears in louisiana all you boys ron and all you other running buddies from south la they're also called pen perch holy cow i need to catch up y'all hang with me travis paul smith got a message from mr dr sean mcnulty by the way waiting on tiger bass yeah yeah well they've hatched now they're letting the fry grow up to be a marketable size to get as many of them on fish food as possible mike fornash just finished doing using a pond master test kit on my one acre 17 year old pond what do you recommend the ph ammonia nitrate and phosphate levels to be well i'll tell you what i'm gonna say here what i'm gonna tell you is you want your ph to be between six and eight uh ammonia you want it to be less than one part per million nitrate is going to change with the moment phosphorous less than point zero .04 in order for it to not be a nuisance phosphate levels change because phosphorus changes but here's with your water chemistry here's what you want you want your ph to be between six and eight seven is neutral um it's okay if it's a little bit more a little bit less just not ideal and you want your alkalinity to be at least 40 parts per million or higher up to about 180 or 200 parts per million there's kelly hart i got spent time with kelly yesterday kelly's building a really cool about eight acre lake up in central oklahoma and he's got his dam about a third of the way through and our the mission yesterday was to figure out his habitat plant now he's got like three fingers of creeks that come in to a confluence where they're digging soil out to make the bowl of the lake and our job yesterday and now kelly has gone in and cleaned out some brush and set flags where the water level is going to be so that's part of the process of doing this is you got to get the site clear enough that you can move dirt figure out where the dam's going to be and then if you can set flags where the water line is going to be then you can begin to visualize what's going to be that horizontal plane of the lake then you got to make decisions on what to do below the water line because like with with kelly he's going to have a whole bunch of trees those are going to get flooded well if he wants standing dead timber he doesn't do anything with them if he wants to remove some he should some of them he'll save like eight to ten inch caliper trees that aren't way too too big and too tall perfect for fish structure he's got several places on his property with big rocks rocks as big as uh half the size of the bed of a pickup he's going to take some of these rocks and use them as landscaping fixtures fixtures and other rocks to create rock piles in water five to eight feet deep so that that's he's working on his habitat plan and i'm gonna draw him a map and write some things up this week i'm in on the road mark dyer howdy from nebraska love the content thank you very much uh chris arthur typically how long does it take fingerlings to find the fish food after released into a pond eight acres depends on how many you stocked like if you stopped um fingerling bluegills it's probably gonna take them a month or six weeks to find the fish food so in that case go ahead and feed them but just set the feeder to go off if you've got two feeders and an eight acre pond or three feeders in an eight acre lake uh set it to go off for two seconds because when they're fingerlings you know what that means is with bluegill they're about that big you know they've got a lot of natural food especially i'm assuming we're talking about a brand new lake that's what i'm assuming and so they've got enough natural native food so they're going to do fine it's going to take them till they're probably three or four inches long before they really find that fish food and when they do find it they're gonna peck on it now once they hit about five four and a half five six inches long then they'll erupt on it and they'll hit it so fast you can't even see them they're up hit down up hit down i mean bam bam bam like that so it may take six weeks before they really start coming to that fish food all right looks like uh travis paul smith said it took his a week and it depends it truly depends on how many fish you stock look at there matt marsden and eddie eddings are becoming buddies hey there's stan lee good friend of mine yep i'm back at the office i am today i am right now i'll be in a hotel here in about two hours travis got back from mexico is there four months check just 600 you know what the hogs been getting fed a little bit okay we love it dave webber from outside of kansas city when the boss is at the pulpit you know i actually do have a pulpit chuck made a pulpit out of cedar it's pretty cool thanks for the kind words morgan tyler hey morgan i was just singing the praises of purina uh aquamax products and there's morgan checking in morgan is he works with trina mills he's uh he really drills in more into wildlife feed but he knows how to feed a fish too oh drew haye must be on here i see that uh ron's telling hello chuck brinkman checking in he's um somebody's telling me i sound pretty rough i don't know who that is better back up and look i do sound pretty rough because my dad young wife put the thermostat on 63 degrees in hotel room next morning i had a dream i thought i saw some meat hanging from one of the dead young black fixtures in there i want to back up make sure i'm covering all this stuff yep you know when i'm listening to the radio i don't want to hear dead air and i know you don't either but let's see here i'm coming on down coming on down and getting back where we were oh yeah debbie dobbs lusk you sound pretty rough honey my throat's been a little bit grizzled just a little bit grizzled and uh if sawyers tell sawyer to keep watching me tell sawyer pop hey sawyer who loves you baby papa loves me that's my deal with all the grandkids i say hey who loves you baby and their job is to say papa loves me about half the time they say memes loves me well we know that okay so honey i just now saw your post let's see here coming on down jeremy duckworth good to see you buddy let's see frank james bobby took your advice and began feeding at night to cut back on geese stinging in the pellets how do the fish respond tonight feeding they get used to it they don't care they don't care if it's dark or light they know they know that when that feeder goes off and that feed hits the water they got a free deal free meal deal you know they're not they're not punching the time clock they're not working they're going to get accustomed to it and they're going to eat it how do the fish respond okay do the same fish eat it as do do during the day or is the night shift delivered no no i tell you what the night shift won't be different because what happens is you're going to get to feed hogs so the fish are the most aggressive fastest growing fish are going to be the first ones to the feeder now once they fill their little bellies up and they disappear then the rest of the fish will be able to get more feed so it kind of depends on how much you're feeding the more you feed up to a point the more fish that you feed and uh it it'll be the same aggressive fish at night as it is during the daytime i hope i said that convincingly although i can't prove it harrison davis i know i can go to the university of google but why do that when we got the doctor in the house why are bluegill called bluegill oh my gosh i got to tell you a story way back i know this had to be 2005 or six i got invited to go to canada to go fishing now back then ray scott and his crew would invite uh as many people as he could of course i think his deal was if he invited people and put the trip together his trip was free so we would fly in the international falls catch a van across into canada show our passports then the van takes us to a dock climb on a float plane and we fly up into the boundary waters to this camp well when i the very first time i went i got to international falls and i they were they told me to ship my gear ahead ship it ups and that way i could get it there it would be ready at the at the airport in a in a hangar somewhere and it would save money so i shipped all my fishing gear up there and i had just strolled out and found it at the freight dock and i was carrying it back around to get ready to come on the van and i see a van coming around in a 12 passenger van i look at somebody's going like that hey come here me yeah come here and so the van door opens and there's johnny morris the guy that started bass pro shops he's with bill dance charlie campbell look up charlie campbell with little jimmy dickens look him up and porter wagner in this van and these are all people that i watched as i was growing up and so johnny said hey settle an argument and i said what is it he says why do they call a gizzard shad a gizzard shad i thought oh my gosh i better get this right because if i miss this in front of these famous people oh my gosh i'll be embarrassed and i said with johnny because they have a gizzard he said that's what i told you guys that they said okay okay okay and uh gizzard shatter call gets a chef because they have a gizzard so i want to tell you that story because bluegills are called bluegills because they have a over here a little blue flap on their gill and that's it all that drama to get to that right drew hey billy bates bob besides you of course who you feeling the foremost expert on bluegill who do you trust when it comes to bluegill knowledge um well you know what i think bruce condello knows him as much about bluegills as anybody does i think over at malone's fish farm in in arkansas does now i'm basing this on science and experience because i know that the bruce candelo for about eight or nine years grew bluegills without good fish food with fertile water and he would cull and select for the size and the growth rates and then use those fish to keep creating or or manipulating genetics now nutritionists like um oh gosh um mark griffin i think he knows a lot about bluegill but now i can't i can't say that without talking about people that catch big bluegill you know i mean when you look at bruce candela's big bluegill page there's people all over the country that know how to catch big bluegill so when it comes to somebody that's the foremost expert on bluegills you know it's kind of hard to say who's the foremost expert if i had to pick one person i'd probably pick bruce because i know what he's done to learn about them now i i have to put myself up there with him although i don't focus on bluegill as much as he focuses on bluegill that gives him an edge that's probably more time than i needed to spend on that but there you go danny mac my anecdotal experience is that fish never feel full especially channeling catfish no food pellets get left behind you know what i like that and i'll tell you why when i was uh when i was in the ninth grade my parents bought a place on the brazos river down between granberry and glen rose i'll always remember my favorite times of the year to catch challenge catfish in that river was labor day weekend that just so happened that they would let enough water out to have a fairly good flow rate fish would be moving but that's about the time those big yellow grasshoppers are about that big now we'd get a coffee can with a plastic top and my dad would take his pocket knife and cut an x in the lid well you could take a flashlight and go out on the sunflowers in the field with that flashlight and you could pluck those big o yellow grasshoppers off of those sunflowers we had like three 20 hook trotlines and we'd go out in a little john boat pole up and down the river and we'd go bait the bottom one first and i'd thread two or three grasshoppers on each hook and then go up and by the time we finish baiting the third one we just go back downstream and start running the trotline and we do that until about two in the morning and then we go back up and go to sleep well i had a zepco 33 that uh and i had this device that i shoved way down in the sand and i put a grasshopper on about a number two hook and threw it out there with a slip sinker and it in it the current was strong enough that it washed all the way up against the bank well i went to sleep woke up about six o'clock to go down and check the trot lines so i noticed that my zebco was bent over double it was in the middle of the river so i started reeling that thing in my little 14 year old heart was pounding bam bam bam bam reeled that sucker in and i caught the i caught about a six pound channel catfish with the biggest belly i'd ever seen now of course when you're 14 and you're me you hadn't seen that many so i brought it in and took it up and we cleaned it and that dad gum channel catfish had eaten a pocket gopher about that big so i guess a gopher when the river rose gopher got washed into the river catfish swallowed it whole and then he ate a grasshopper he wasn't hungry he was greedy but i can't tell you how many times i have caught a bass reeled it in and there'll be a tail of a big fish sticking out of its gullet and it still ate something so what uh so what he's talking about danny mac is i totally buy into that even though a fish is full that doesn't mean it won't eat now what they will do around the fish feeder is they'll come eat that fish food until they're satiated and then they'll move away but that don't mean they won't come right back in 15 minutes and eat something else because they will travis is digging upon gonna be 1.25 acres gonna stock it with five to six six five to seven inch tiger bass i want to feed the bax bass aqua max 500 600 primary fish food how much forage should i stock and what texas hunter feeder gonna grow the best for the nine acre lake well all right you know what let's take a minute on that let's let's let's talk about that i'm gonna answer that question directly i would stock the forage as though you weren't going to feed the bass go ahead and stock that 5 to 10 pounds of fat heads per surface acre or more you stock as many as 30 pounds per surface acre in the beginning now don't do that afterwards do that first stock up to 2 000 bluegill per acre because you got to keep in mind even though you've got even though you may have two texas hunter feeders on that small pond they're only going to go off three times a day for 10 seconds a piece or 20 seconds a piece that leaves 23 more hours and change for the fish to be eating on their own you know and so um now here's the caveat when you're going to take that 1.25 acre lake and you're stocking five to seven inch tiger baths keep in mind that half of them are boys half of them are girls and the half that are girls about 25 or 30 percent of those will have the genetic propensity and the aggressive nature to be the biggest of the batch so if you stock 200 bass that means that 25 or 30 of them will be the ones that will be the beasts there'll be another 20 25 that can grow to be beasts so out of that there may be out of that 200 fish there may be 50 of them that will be the best of the best if they get the opportunity so you're going to be calling bass in that 1.25 acre pond if you're growing those fish to put into your nine acre lake just keep that in mind referencing the bluegill remark what about red ears i don't consider anybody an expert on red ears i don't think there is any expert on red ears and the reason is is red you know red ears are kind of the stepchildren in the in the sunfish business they're looked at more as an insurance policy to assist in the food chain because they spawn between bluegill spawns and they're an insurance policy because they're stocked to uh to eat snails they're not really stocked to be trophy fish if they become a trophy fish it's a by-product of other trophy fish with one exception when you get over into western arizona where quagga mussels have gone nuts and and red ear sunfish grow to be five pounds now there's a number of anglers that you could say are expert red ear anglers but they didn't do beans to make those fish grow that big those fish grew that big because they were the most opportunistic most aggressive fastest growing red ear that you could get and they had the opportunity because of all the quagga mussels jerry oller videographer deluxe if you live in the san antonio area or heck now that there's airplanes have been invented he'll go anywhere but jerry oller is a um uh he's a premier videographer as a matter of fact some of the videos on the bob lusk institute of higher pondology were shot by jerry owler and his contact information is on each one of those and yes sir hey jerry i'm gonna do this commercial just for you 35 bucks a year folks cheaper than a friday night date it lasts a year that's the way it goes let's see here i miss some things let me see here yep travis paul smith says uh just want to ask everybody to pray for jimmy houston's wife yes his bride had a stroke the day after easter uh he's um he's putting up several videos to kind of tell her status she's regained consciousness however they're keeping her sedated uh she had a tracheotomy um her name is chris she's in the bass fishing hall of fame you know she is she is she is it was you say your wife is your better half i think jimmy houston can honestly say that he's right there by her side okay harrison just wanted to hear one of my great stories i'm full of stories buddy i got a lot of stories i got some cool stories so yes prayers for chris houston brian epting says so it's okay to stock both radiator and bluegill and absolutely now here's your ratios for every thousand bluegills you stock stock 250 red ears because they uh they and this this will make sense to you ready are nicknamed shell crackers because they have these two little bony pads in the back of their throat so when they eat a snail they don't chew it up it goes to the back of their throat they got these little bony pads that come together just crush it grind it like a grist mill grind sweet or corn so uh that's how they eat now bluegill don't have that you know bluegill gotta be able to eat something swallow it and then digest it where red ear they can crush it so they can eat crustaceans they can and that's why they get so big over in western arizona eastern california because they're eating quaker mussels so they eat these little mussels about so big swallow them crush them digest them and they're the only fish that can do that in that environment friday night date goes right last a lifetime john henry there's the quote of the day right there read him up read him up eat him up dion myers hashtag palmas magazine you guys got it i was going to tell you a little bit about my travels today which i think this would this would help you i got a call from a guy oh i don't know i was referred to him by somebody that referred him to somebody that referred him to somebody to me so anyway this guy bought a uh a quail hunting ranch over southeast of paris texas and on the ranch or several lakes the the prior owner that the guy bought it from loves to fish and so they got built several lakes there's probably 40 acres of water which i haven't i'll figure that out but there's probably that much there's one lake that i bet covers 20 acres then probably eight or ten smaller ponds so in his mind's eye he's thinking he should take all those ponds and turn them into fishing lakes or fishing ponds well he doesn't really know what he wants other than he knows he's going to entertain people that are quail hunters and he wants to provide them a value-added service of being able to catch a few fish so when i explained to him you know what we really need to sit do sit down and do is create a master game plan and what we do there is we need to ask ask yourself what are your goals and specifically what are your goals about these ponds and lakes we've got several ponds in a flood plain that about every five or six years are going to flood from a creek so trying to grow fish in that if you don't harvest the fish in that year you're probably not going to get much out of it over the long time long term and so with the fishing legs there's some ponds that look like they grow fish that you can catch some of them look like they won't so what i told him is let's create a master plan figure out the user groups what do they want to catch how much pressure is there going to be and then let's look at all these pawns individually and then let's look at them as a unit so in other words we're going to create a fishing program now when i notice i said i didn't say fish program i said fishing program if realistically if he's got 12 ponds with fish in them what are the odds that those all those ponds are going to get fished often zero so take some of those ponds and use them to grow forage fish or to grow out fish like what travis was talking about to grow some of the best of the best to use in the key fishing lakes so designate which lakes are key fishing lakes then how can the other lakes and ponds support that with your fishing program so the next thing we're going to do is is brainstorm just to create the goals and then figure out what his expectations are then come in and evaluate where each one of these bodies of water is and then come up with a game plan to get from where he is to where he wants to be now that means electro fishing the ponds that means looking at habitat that means studying the water that means figuring out does he have the right food chain and once we assess all that then we come up with a game plan that's going to include stocking habitat improvement producing the food chain genetics so the the take on point for everybody here is is before you that what what the first conversation i had with him he wanted to order a bunch of fish no no no let's don't order any fish until we know what it is that you need to do then if we need to order fish let's order fish i'm all for that but creating that master game plan is going to be key to the success of him not spending money on the dumb tax now you guys have heard me talk about the dumb tax we don't know what we don't know he doesn't know what he doesn't know so part of my job as his consultant is to teach him the things that he doesn't know so he can make good decisions so part of that is to create a master plan set goals understand your resources what do you have to work with you got a budget employees equipment assess what you've got with the fishery and the resources and then create a game plan to thoughtfully get you from here to here to here to here and then keep it there so that's the way i think that we need to look at that let's see there's dion myers good i saw neon while ago chris horsley in an eight acre bass brimlink about how many bass should you take out each year well chris the the uh the general consensus of among biologists is to harvest between 20 and 30 pounds of bass per per acre per year that might be 25 one pound bass it might be 43 quarter pound bass but if you'll weigh and measure some of those fish and plug those numbers into a excel spreadsheet that shows you the standards if you guys don't have that email me i'll send you one i'll send you an excel spreadsheet ring plug in your links and weights and you guys can track that but the fish will tell you when you're harvesting enough because they'll gain weight so as long as your fish are above the standard weight of any given length then you're okay so the direct answer is 25 to 40 pounds about 25 to 30 pounds of bass per acre 20 to 30 pounds of bass per acre so there's your direct answer the real answer is call enough that the remaining fish continue to grow it's even more complicated than that because you want to selectively harvest you don't want just because a 12 inch bass bites your hook if it weighs 14 ounces you don't want to take it out but if you catch a 12 inch bass that weighs 10 ounces yes you do all right let's see here like many i stock 20 percent ready with 80 bluegill never seen it right here since did they did they start yes they can starving a new pond you got to keep in mind that each one of these fish that you stock has got to have happy water it's got to have the right food chain great habitat and if they don't have that they're not going to thrive so if they don't have the right habitat and the right food change so if if ready or sunfish don't have the right habitat which is going to be aquatic plants because that's where the snails live they don't have the right food chain which is snails they're not going to thrive i've actually seen ponds or where red ear sunfish have thrived and bluegill didn't but most of the time it's the other way around because there's not enough of the right habitat with the right food chain for red air sunfish to thrive harrison davis is throwing out a little bit of his wisdom there you gotta catch him close to the bottom redder sunfish do tend to hunker closer to the bottom they're not quite as aggressive as bluegill are for the most part and they're usually hanging out in that vegetation let's see frank james has got something here frank from louisiana bob i read about fast growing bluegill redder sunfish hybrids and an article in the march april pomboss magazine do you have any experience with these fish are they available for stocking somewhere well the bluegill red ear sunfish hybrids most of the ones i see occur naturally in a pond because you know a male red ear sunfish has no issues spawning with a female bluegill but it's not common for a male bluegill to spawn with a female red ear because the female red ears are spawning with male red ears because the male readers are ready to go all the time let's see um are they they available you know what i don't know that you know i i got a feeling there's a few hatcheries around that still raised some of those but they're not they're not a real popular sales item travis paul smith do you still have your electric fishing boat do you come to mississippi actually i do um actually i sold my fit my boat to american sport fish hatchery when they bought out my pond management company but there they bring the electro fishing boat to mississippi several times a year so scott angelico says do you really need plants in the pond as long as you have a lot of trees in the water all the way up to the shoreline um really depends on the kind of trees if you've got button bush the answer is no if you've got cypress trees with open roots the answer is no but if you've got water oaks and it's a trunk or you've got pond cypress whose roots aren't opened up the answer is no i don't see anything wrong with having a mix of both let's see here kenny sanderson not sure where you are frank's near shreveport louisiana kenny kenny's in northwest kansas phillip minifield often here in one of the gold sphere pond when speaking of pond management tactics is there a guy that talks about different types of ponds i know for example a trophy bass pond but that's not what i'm looking for well philip the way that i work at this what i do is when i sit down and ask your goals i'm not necessarily asking about fish goals although we do pin that down what i'll say is philip i'll say why'd you buy this land why'd you buy this property why do you want water on it you know and 99 times out of 100 a landowner knows the answer may not have ever voiced it but i'm buying water a ranch with water on it because i want the serenity uh it's because i want to eat fish it's because i want my wife to be able to sit in a swing and read a book beside it you know so i drill into those goals and once i understand the goals then i try to get into your head the way that you think and then help create that premier environment that you're looking for it it usually includes fish but not necessarily uh it might include water but not necessarily because of the water because of the water the sound makes i've actually had people say i love to hear water well that tells me well we better design it where they can be close enough to electricity to pick water up run it over a waterfall or have a fountain you know so when we start talking about goals it's not necessarily pond goals although it it drills into that it's more about why did you buy that property and what are your expectations and what do you see in five years and once we see that then we start getting down into to the specific goals here comes my friend chris blood with texas hunter products bob thanks for the wealth of knowledge uh-oh scroll past it what's the process to hire you you know i never do plug myself very good chris i do want to plug the bob lusk institute of higher pondology there i've got 22 videos up that are outstanding content and you can find it by going to i think pondboss.teachable.com if that isn't it i'll post a link as soon as i'm finished with this show and that way you can find it i see nick peterson fisheries biologist just checked in um so what's the process the process to hire me is to call my office 903 564-6144 which is also the pawn boss office leave a message i'll call you back and then we'll go through an interview process when i know what your goals are then if i can help you i'll be glad to what i'm doing now more than anything is is i've downsized by selling my pond management business you're going to see me in an electric fishing boat maybe 15 times a year where it used to be 115 times a year you'll uh see me out talking to somebody about designing a lake a lot more than i did five years ago y'all see that moth flying around looks like a dead gum bomber but it's not so uh i'm happy to help you design a program to make your legs better but i'm probably not going to be sainting any fish i'm 65 66 i'm done with that veto thank you very much he just put up the link there you go and there's i think like six different modules but if you want to hire me uh call and let's talk about it i'll return your call and we'll discuss it if i'm the right one we'll talk about that if i'm not i'll refer you and also keep in mind that we've got the pom boss resource guy i can't i can't promote this enough we've got sources from everything from aeration to fish food to a fish hatcheries and this is also online at pomboss.com you know so i do i do i can't do it all i don't want to do it all so um i'm happy to refer you if it's not me i'll refer you somebody that's really good at it okay let's see here oh by the way hey frank since you want to sign up for the pondology course hey guys listen to this if you want 15 off in the coupon section on there when you when you sign up it's going to say coupon code or something it's it's pawn boss all capital letters one word just put in pawn boss and you'll get a 15 discount now that that discount is for the first 20 people that sign up and it ends on may the 7th so if you sign up between now and may the 7th you'll get that 15 percent discount there you go all right well it's 7 30 i'm going to wrap it up i can't believe my voice lasted this long thank heavens for cough syrup and you guys i always tell you how much i love you and i appreciate you watching this show uh oh hey next wednesday i'll be fishing but there's a lodge over at lake allen henry which is south east of lubbock and i'll have a couple of special guests if i can get them drunk enough to come on with me now i didn't really say that but we're gonna have some guests be broadcasting live from a lodge over there i think it's called woody's lodge so until next wednesday i look forward to seeing you guys again thanks for joining me adios

Channel: ThePondBoss

Views: 198

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Pond Boss, Pond Boss magazine, Bob Lusk, ponds, lakes, fish habitat, Mossback Fish Rack, largemouth bass, big fish, bluegill, institute of higher pondology

Id: ixFbXloZIEQ

Length: 60min 39sec (3639 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021