Small lakes = small fish?

[The Baron]

I'm in the process of exploring and finding canoe fishing spots, trying to use the portability to my advantage and go places the bass boats can't.  Thinking that means bigger fish.  However, I'm finding that the small lakes that I can slip into produce higher numbers of smaller fish.  One lake in particular is maybe 20 acres in size and I've been there a few times, catching dozens of largemouth under a pound and just a handful over that, with nothing over about 2#.   I don't know how deep the lake is, yet (will be taking my portable fish-finder next trip) but there are lots of bluegill, so there's no reason I can think of there aren't bigger bass in the lake.  Conversely, there is a well know lake system near me that regularly produces largemouth up to and over 5#.  I've fished it a few times and broken the 4# mark, with a few others over 3#.  The lake has tournaments on it regularly and the parking lots always have trucks/trailers parked and we see a few boats on the lake wherever we go - not crowds, but steady pressure.

 

So, what makes one lake produce big bass and another only small ones?   Are the bass in the small lake just overpopulated and maybe I should take a few meals home?  Or do some lakes just have that special recipe and other simply don't?

[Bankc]

It's all a balance of the ecosystem.  There's a limited amount of forage in any given lake.  That limits the amount of food for any given bass.  If number of bass in a lake are larger than the forage can support, then they'll struggle to grow, as there won't be enough food to go around.  Larger bass require more food to survive and grow.  However, if the number of LMB is smaller than what the lake can support, they'll continue to grow larger and larger each year until they reach that balance point.  

 

I've found some small ponds to have monsters in them.  In fact, my biggest bass have always come from small ponds.  Especially private ponds where people regularly remove and eat the fish they catch.  There are several larger lakes near me that I've fished for years and never caught anything above 3-1/2 lbs (and rarely break 2lbs).  The reason being that no one keeps largemouth, spotted, or smallmouth bass around here, and there are large populations of white bass, crappie and catfish to keep pressure on the baitfish.  So there's just not enough food to support large bass.  There might be a few in these lakes, but they're extremely hard to find.  In one lake, before a virus swept through and killed off most of the largemouth, there were giants in it.  It was originally designed to be a trophy LMB lake, and supported them.  But after the LMB population got decimated, the white bass, catfish and crappie took over, and now the lake is stocked with tons of white bass, catfish and crappie, but only a small population of stunted LMB.  It's been more than 20 years now, and it'll likely never recover the trophy LMB without some kind of human intervention.  

[Koz]

I think that forage, water quality, and fish population are at the top of the list. But small lakes and ponds can produce big bass.

 

My father had a 1/3 acre lagoon in his back yard and I caught a 6 pounder there. In SC we had thousands of small, medium, and large lagoons and there were plenty of 7 pound+ and double digit bass.

 

But there were some lagoons where we only caught dinks. Lots and lots of dinks, like on every cast.

 

I love my kayak, but I really miss bank fishing all of those lagoons.

[LrgmouthShad]

If I had to guess, I think 70ish% of 5-6lbers I’ve caught have come from ol muddy pond, 2 acres, maximum depth about 7ft. Water visibility sometimes less than a foot. Never caught one over 6.5 though. 

 

[gim]

Up here in the north, we have a problem in some smaller, shallow lakes called winter kill.  If the lake is not deep enough, and the winter drags on, there becomes a lack of dissolved oxygen in the water and it will result in a fish die off.  It happens regularly here.  Some lakes have installed bubblers or oxygenators to combat this issue.

 

To the OP, if there are an abundance of small 1 pound bass in the lake, harvesting a few would do it some good.  We don't really have that problem here, but we have a similar problem with small northern pike abundance.  So much to the point where the daily bag limit in most of the state is now 10 per angler.  Harvesting small pike would be very beneficial to many of these smaller lakes.  And even more important would be to release all of the medium to large sized ones.  Because big pike eat small pike.

[casts_by_fly]

Its all about the ecology pyramid you'll have learned about in middle/high school.  If you let nature find its balance, this is what you get:

 

 

 

For a lake, the primary producers are your aquatic vegetation, algae, and anything else that can take water, nutrients, and sunlight to grow and make energy.  You then need organisms like insects and crustaceans to convert that plant energy into animals.  From there small fish like minnows eat the insects, bigger fish eat the minnows, and predators eat the bigger fish.  Proportionally, this is how it has to work.  In absolute terms if you want that 0.1% of third level consumers (i.e. bass assuming you have pike or musky around) to have a large population then you need to have a large enough base to support it.  People always talk about baitfish but baitfish only survive if there are enough nutrients in the water in the first place converted by enough producers.  Farm ponds are a good example.  For their size, most farm ponds shouldn't have fish in the multiple pounds range and yet I've witnessed multiple 8+ lb fish coming from 1-3 acre PA farm ponds.  Nutrients = a large fish population.

 

All of the above is for a system in equilibrium.  If someone stocks 10k lb of baitfish every year, you don't need the producers as much (until stocking stops).  If someone stocks 10k 8" bass then you add a demand higher up the chain which will either feed the apex predators or cause a crash of the secondary consumers.  When the state does fish surveys, they are trying to determine how steep the sides are on the pyramid to know what the balance is and why.  A lake with a bigger top layer than the layer below can support will mean that top layer has smaller or less healthy individuals which is what you could be seeing.

 

Or, you just don't know how to catch big bass.  ?

 

[The Baron]

Yes, next trip to Dink Lake I’ll be bringing my portable fish finder.  I’ll float the middle and see what lies beneath - maybe all the little ones I’ve been catching around the shore are just pushed up there by the giants of the deep.  lol

[DitchPanda]

Overpopulated lakes = small stunted bass. As mentioned above some selective harvest could help over time. I've got a county pond 10 minutes from my house...not sure actual size maybe 8-10 acres. Over the past 10 years I've caught dozens of nice bass in the 5-6lb range...even got an 8 a few years back.

[Team9nine]

Small lakes doesn't always mean small bass, necessarily. When our local paper ran their weekly/yearly big fish contests (for nearly 30 years), farm ponds and strip pits always gave up a majority of the biggest bass caught every year. There are a lot of factors involved, several of them mentioned above. Even in the overran lakes full of small bass, there is almost always a "barrier breaker" or two that happened to escape the resource partition that sometimes exists. One small pond I fish is 1.25 acres, and full of small bass. I've caught hundreds from it, with none even approaching 3 pounds...except two; a 5.5 and a 7. I would say the smaller the water body, the more things have to go "right" to keep the proper balance and necessary food supply in alignment to consistently produce better fish. Lots of things can mess that balance up pretty quickly.

[TriStateBassin106]

There's so many factors but once you understand the basics it's easier to know why some fisheries are different than others with fish growth. I follow this guy on Instagram called aquatic_biologist and he always makes great posts about the balance of forage and other factors such as overpopulation of bass which results in stunted growth, not enough forage like bluegill and also competition with other fish species like crappie can also hurt the growth of bass. 

[Darth-Baiter]

I have a small local lake. they stock trout for the kids.  as a result, giant green bass.

 

I have lazy friends that hate a long commute to fish.  I'll be 2 hours away on some exotic remote location on the California Delta, and they get bigger fish 7 minutes from my home. it's a jagged pill to swallow, but I look for a balance of things fishing.  scenery, solace, and just learning new things are on that list.  my small local lake is killer. 

[WRB]

Carrying capacity varies in every lake, pond, river etc.

If the 12” bass are skinny with big heads they are stunted from lack of food. Healthy chubby small bass indicates the food source is good.

Tom

[Bluebasser86]

My PB swimbait fish was 6lbs and came from a tiny puddle I could easily cast across. Very few bass even in it, but they're all super healthy and fat. Lots of sunfish and shiners for them to eat and vegetation to hid in, that's the key. Good food and environment to live in will grow at least a few big ones. 

[papajoe222]

A local club that I fish fairly regularly had a similar situation for years; An abundance of small bass and just a handfull of fish over 3lb.  They turned the lake around by changing size/limit restrictions and encouraging angles to keep some of the fish under 12in. By the fifth year after implimentation, not only did the number of quality fish caught increase, the number of smaller fish diminished. 

Sometimes nature needs a hand to get to where we would like her to be.

[bassh8er]

My PB bass (8 lbs 1 oz) came from a decent sized pond but a smaller body of water than any of the public lakes around me.

 

This particular pond is much like you describe where I could catch 30ish bass each time but rarely one over 1.5 lbs.  The pond had huge panfish though.  Nearly every crappie was a 13” clone and bluegills all 9”.

 

I’ve found the smaller bodies of water to have large amounts of small bass and smaller quantities of large panfish or small amounts of larger bass with larger amounts of small panfish; rarely have I found larger panfish and larger bass in the same pond.  
 

Just my observation.

[Woody B]

Some intelligent people have given reasons why magic happens in some ponds, and doesn't in others.  

 

So, does the presence of apex predators help?   I caught an 8 pounder years ago in the small canal around Moroso Motorsports Park in West Palm Florida.  The canal was full of gators.   

 

My Grandson caught this in a pond that's slightly over 1 acre.  (no gators in that SC pond)

 

[Tennessee Boy]

The simplest answer is it’s complicated.  ?

 

Check out pondboss.com.  There’s a lot of good info there.  There are so many things that have to be right to grow big bass in a pond.  Hot water is good for forage but not for bass.   A large pond might provide more diverse habitat for both.  Other than that I don’t think pond size is that important.

[slonezp]

Poor habitat=small fish

[txchaser]

On 7/13/2022 at 11:57 AM, Team9nine said:

Even in the overran lakes full of small bass, there is almost always a "barrier breaker" or two that happened to escape the resource partition that sometimes exists.

100%... if they make it big enough to consider the dinks a food source, they can get really big

 

 

On 7/13/2022 at 6:00 AM, The Baron said:

Are the bass in the small lake just overpopulated and maybe I should take a few meals home? 

on culling, yes definitely. and in small waters you can make a big difference pretty quickly. I think pondboss says 40lbs/ac/year to cull as an average. 

[TnRiver46]

Man, my buddy had a family cow pond that produced monster bass all the time, I never really learned why but it was awesome. 6-8 and sometimes 10 lbers were likely. We were always scared to death of the bull and all the barbed wire and electric fence but that was one heck of a pond. It had huge catfish too . 
 

maybe cow dung produces monster bass ??????

[WRB]

The OP is from Canada where lakes freeze. Depending on the latitude Canada is at the edge of Largemouth bass survival zone because of lack of prey sources and competition from toothy fish. Smallmouth can survive a little further north then LMB.

Habitat is the primary factor and marginal distribution zone, it’s simply too cold.

Tom

[soflabasser]

I learned a long time ago to never underestimate any body of water since big bass can be found anywhere that has a healthy population of baitfish. For example, I have caught big bass in ponds and small canals that most would overlook.

[WRB]

Castaic Lagoon is small lake less then a mile long 1/4 mile wide,197 surface acres, 70’ deep. Small lake anywhere yet has produce dozens of giant bass over 12 lbs, 19.3 lbs is Butch Browns PB from the lagoon. Prime bass habituate and low fishing pressure because electric motors only.

Castiac lake above the dam is also a small lake 2 1/2 miles long x 1/2 wide, 2,200 surface acres and over 300’ deep that has produced 100’s of giant bass over 12 lbs, lake record is 21 lbs 15 oz officially.

Castiac get high fishing pressure and recreation water sports.

Stripe bass have ruined Castiac lake trophy bass fishing by reducing the prey source therefore the carrying capacity has changed.

Tom

[geo g]

Good PH of the water.  Good balance of bass, baitfish. Crayfish, turtles, and all other natural forage.  If you find one without a lot of pressure, keep it quiet!  These can hold some big fish.

[A-Jay]

Here in northern Michigan,

I am surrounded by a serious amount of 'small' lakes & ponds.

From a canoe, for almost 10 years I fished as many of them and at different times (including at night) as I could.

What all those hours and hours on the water taught me was, regardless of a lakes reputation,

or what it says is any publication, the ONLY way to find out what a body of water's potential may be, is to FISH IT.

 I found that 'good places' often were not and lakes that they people had 'written off' were great.

So now I just go fishing and I make my own conclusions. 

BTW, I have found so many awesome lakes, that are 'hidden in plain sight' it's ridiculous. 

Just have to be there at the right time doing the right thing. 

https://youtu.be/02fPoZHOri8?t=1153

A-Jay