Female-Only Largemouth Ponds: Great in Theory

Some of our competitors tout female-only largemouth bass ponds as the way to having the best possible trophy-bass fishing in a private pond or lake. We made a conscious decision years ago to not utilize this method. Would I purposely avoid using this approach if it were really the best way to have the best bass fishing? Or is there a better way?

I have never stocked a pond with this strategy. However, there is a corollary in the bluegill world, known mainly to big-bluegill nuts such as myself: with bluegill, because the males of the species get bigger on average than females, the pond is stocked with males only, eliminating reproduction; there is exponentially more food available to the few bluegill that are stocked, and they get much bigger, and the pond owner catches his personal best every time he fishes.

In theory.

In practice, you have to start out with bluegill that are at least seven inches long, so they can be conclusively identified as male; the average pond consultant probably needs them to be eight inches or more, to get that step right. Let’s say the fish come from our farm; we selectively breed our bluegill, and only sell fast-growing species, hand-painted and coppernose; we feed substantially more than the average hatchery; so our bluegill grow faster than the average bluegill you would get from a random hatchery. But bluegill in a hatchery pond have no predators, unlike the typical recreational pond, so they’re at a density thousands of times that of the recreational pond; whereas a one-acre pond with bass in it might have a couple hundred bluegill longer than an inch in it at any given time, perhaps a few hundred if it’s being managed, that same one acre of water at a fish farm could easily have 50,000 or more bluegill in it. So the fish grow much slower due to extreme competition for food. We feed at a much higher rate than most recreational ponds are fed at, but there’s still far more competition for the food. So that eight-inch bluegill might be two years old when he’s stocked into your pond, at which point he has already lived a third of his life expectancy. So that fish is already a year behind a fish that, for example, was stocked into a pond at two inches long, that might have been three or four months old at stocking but can easily reach eight inches by the end of its first year. I’ll give you a specific example: the first year I raised hand-painted bluegill in a hatchery setting was 2015. I stocked thirty-two adult hand-painteds from the Apalachicola River into a 2/3-acre pond in middle Tennessee that had been dug expressly for them, and which had nothing in it other than grass shrimp when the bluegill were stocked, in October 2014. The smallest bluegill I stocked into the pond were seven inches long, so I knew that anything smaller than that would be young-of-year. In May 2015 I saw the first fry, about a half-inch long; by September the pond had had multiple hatches, and some of those fry that had hatched out in late April or early May were already six inches long. This was before the pond had reached its carrying capacity, so there was more food available, and the fish grew fast. Bluegill can go from an inch to eight inches or more within a year of stocking with ideal conditions. But if they’re already two years or more old by the time you stock them at that size, you’ve lost a lot of time.

But this is supposed to be an article about largemouth. Florida bass can grow two to three pounds a year in ideal conditions; F1 largemouth can grow at that rate, but don’t live as long as pure Floridas. Now let’s talk about what constitutes ideal conditions. Ideal conditions is a pond that is stuffed to the brim with forage fish of several species; you’re not getting three pounds of growth a year stocking a few forage fish here and there once every few years. I made another blog post recently about one of my competitors, who if nothing else is clearly a better salesman than I am because he had convinced a landowner to stock 3,000 pounds of forage fish, per year, in a one-acre pond. If they’re selling that forage to the landowner even at half the going retail rate, said landowner is still spending $30,000 per year on forage; if they’re charging him retail he’s shelling out $60K a year, just on food for his bass. That’s not counting the pellets they’re selling him to put in his feeders to feed the bluegill.

Serious question here: how many fish hatcheries do you know of that are going to feed their largemouth at that rate to get them from fry to adult, not knowing in advance whether they’ll have enough customers for the season that want those extra-expensive bass? How much do you think they would have to charge for one bass if they were feeding their bass at that rate? A ten-pound bass would cost you more than a Range Rover. There’s a fish farm in Texas that is known for its exceptional pure Florida bass genetics; they charge $80,000 for an eight-pound bass. One fish.

There are hatcheries in this region that sell adult F1s and Floridas for less. They’re not feeding those bass the amount of forage or food required to grow them at their optimal rate, because if they did and then sold the fish to you for what you would pay, they would go broke in one season. Think back to what that one-acre pond managed by the salesman is getting: $30-60K per year in forage, for 100 bass. That comes out to $300 per year, per bass.

No hatchery is going to raise just 100 fish per year of a certain size. If a hatchery is selling adult bass, they’re raising hundreds, more likely thousands, to that size. Even if a given farm only raises 500 per year for this goal, how many hatcheries do you know that are going to shell out $150,000 every year feeding fish they haven’t yet sold? Fish are delicate creatures; to get 500 bass to adult size, you have to start with at least 1,000, and 1,500 is more realistic. Some will get diseases; some will get eaten by their brothers and sisters. The bottom line is this: if you buy a six- or eight-pound Florida or F1 bass from a hatchery, you can count on that fish being several years old. The average lifespan given for northern largemouth is ten to twelve years; Florida bass can live twelve to seventeen years; F1 bass, depending on the particular combination of genes the fish gets and whether the Florida parent or the northern largemouth parent’s genes dominate, will typically be in the middle between northern and Florida

If you stock an eight-pound bass that’s already nine years old, and it dies two years after you stock it and you never hooked it, what good did it do you? Hatcheries can’t afford to feed bass enough to grow them at their optimal rate, because they’re raising too many bass at one time. If you stock a pond properly for trophy bass such that the forage species have several months to spawn and build up their numbers prior to the predators being stocked, there will be more forage in that pond when the bass are first stocked than bass in any hatchery will ever see. It will take the bass several months, at a minimum, to lower the forage numbers, and if you add more forage yearly, the bass will have more food on a constant basis from the day they’re first stocked until the day they die than they would ever have at a hatchery, and they’ll get big.

If you stock pure Floridas at two to four inches long, and the females grow three pounds a year every year, and the males grow a pound-and-a-half a year (that farm in Texas I referenced has produced ten-pound male Florida bass), what will your pond look like after six years compared to a pond where the bass were much bigger when they were stocked, but most of them have died of old age after six years?

Now back to an even better reason not to stock female-only, and this is the primary reason we don’t do it. Though I have never stocked a pond with female-only largemouth, I have stocked two ponds with male-only bluegill. It’s a fundamental principle of fisheries science that closely-related fish species typically share many characteristics; bluegill and largemouth bass are in the same family, Centrarchid; they share many of the same behaviors, such as nest building, guarding the nest after the fry hatch, etc. The first pond I stocked with male-only bluegill produced promising fishing the first time it was fished; I fished it myself, on the landowner’s request, to see how the fish were doing. This particular pond was a half-acre in size; I had stocked twenty-six male coppernose a little over a year prior; the fish were six to seven inches long when I stocked them. When I fished it a year later, it took me twenty minutes just to get a bite, but then I caught four fish: one was eight inches long, and the other three were nine inches long. This pond had no feeding and no fertilization, so I felt pretty good about those results.

Subsequent to that, I took guide clients to that pond on multiple occasions over the next three years; each time we fished for at least three hours. Not a single bluegill was hooked; not even a legitimate bite was had.

We would see a fish here or there feeding at the surface from time to time; mostly these were mini-explosions that sounded closer to what a largemouth would make, but there were no largemouth in the pond; I firmly believe a state-record bluegill probably died in that pond, but we couldn’t get him to bite. The landowner never caught a single one of those fish.

The second pond I stocked with male-only bluegill was a 3/4-acre pond. This time we stocked 40 coppernose that ranged from three-quarters of a pound, all the way up to one big boy that was easily twenty-four ounces the day we put him into the pond. Two years later, I took a husband-and-wife couple from Michigan to the pond for a guided trip; they fished for three hours and caught six bluegill, five of which went from 1.72 to 1.94 pounds apiece. The next time I fished the pond was a four months later; I fished the pond with a friend and fellow avid bluegill angler; we fished for three hours and caught four fish, the largest two of which weighed 1.65 pounds. I took another guide party to that pond the following spring; we fished for three hours and caught zero fish.

The man who owned that pond died a year later, and we seined the pond shortly after that. We found forty bluegill that would have averaged close to two pounds apiece. So there were lots of big bluegill in the pond - they just wouldn’t bite.

Not once, but multiple times, I have gotten calls from this or that property manager who works for a celebrity or well-to-do individual in this area who has had the misfortune of being duped by one of my competitors who sell all their customers on the bass heaven they’re going to have with a female-only pond. Every time, they have the same complaint: they can’t catch their bass.

If you have to have your pond electrofished to make sure you still have bass in the pond because you never catch them, they’re not doing you much good. If you electrofish your pond and all those big bass you thought you were feeding have died of old age, they’re not doing you much good.

If you stock bass while they’re still young and have almost all of their lifespan left, you can grow them two to three times faster per year than they’re ever going to grow at any hatchery, and you’ll eventually have a chance at a twelve- or fourteen-pound or larger bass, and you’ll have numbers of ten-pounders. And when bass are at a more normal density, they bite better, because they have more other bass they have to compete with for food.

In April 2024, we filmed for our TV show that airs on the Pursuit Channel, on a four-acre pond in northern middle Tennessee, about an hour from the Kentucky border. Some of my competitors would tell you that’s too far north for pure Florida bass; this pond has nothing but pure Florida bass, stocked by my company in 2018 and 2019. In four hours of fishing, myself and my employee Noah caught ten bass over four pounds, including a seven-pound-four-ounce female that was spawned out and easily would have weighed nine pounds or more a month earlier; Noah also lost a larger bass that we got a very good look at when she jumped. All of those fish were caught on lures.

And there are bigger bass in that pond. How do I know that? Because a year and a half earlier, in September 2022, a nine-pound bass was caught and released at that same pond. Not to mention, half the big bass photos on our Instagram came from that pond in March 2022 - every time I turned around, it seemed, the landowner was sending me another photo of a giant Florida bass.

And that landowner is not spending $30K per year on forage - not even close. The pond has had supplemental forage stocked three times in the six-and-a-half years since the bass were stocked into the pond, an average expenditure of $4,000 per year. Which comes to $500 per acre per year over six years. If that pond had been stuffed with forage like that one-acre pond managed by my salesman competitor, it would have shattered the state record for largemouth by now, and would be on track for a world record.

If you’re starting to wonder whether that fast-talking biologist managing your expensive pond is more of a salesman than he is a real biologist, try working with the biologist who actually pays attention and reads the literature and understands fish. Let me show you what it’s like to actually see your pond get better every year, and to actually have big fish you can catch.