>>445135I appreciate your coming to my defence but no need to meet crudity with crudity. Not everybody understands the intricacies of various ecosystems (admittedly myself included) and at the same time they're also not entirely wrong. I know of a few ponds locally where you'll catch plenty of bass and bluegill. But that's also the only two species you'll catch, and the trade-off is that you probably won't catch a bass bigger than 10 nches and the bluegill are no bigger than the palm of your hand (whereas I'm used to catching bluegill that'll cover my palm and fingers easy). Those two species can usually co-exist fairly well even when all other sources of food have vanished. Where I failed to elaborate is that by not culling the mid-sized bass and some of the gills (or redear or whatever the bass are feeding on) you cease to land trophy/citation-sized fish. Barring any other issues the fishing may continue strongly but the multitude of small to medium bass will make for too much competition and prevent older fish from reaching trophy sizes. Again that is another reason for culling which I failed to expand upon; by removing some of the smaller bass the largest in the lake/pond have a better chance of continuing to grow larger. You are also correct that late/poor spawns and any food-source related issues due to meteorological events, farm run-off, or whatever can also lead to an imbalanced ecosystem where the bass may manage to eat themselves out of a food source.
Also we're six posts (five now) from the bump-limit. I've got another anime fishing image to use the next-next time around but if anybody has located another good tackle-shop image to use for an OP pic I'd like to see another one of those so feel free to start the next thread and add to the OP-Text as you see fit. And enjoy a pic of my pops with a near-citation size yellow perch.
