Harvesting Bluegill.

[livnlrn]

How do you tell if a lake has sufficient forage to grow large gills? What can you do to increase the food sources in a lake naturally?

Daryl's answer to my question. Thank you.

Let me answer your question this way--in Nebraska all of them have enough prey to grow large 'gills. I am only partly kidding with that reply. Seriously, with our geology and watersheds we do not have any waters that are unproductive. The question is how many bluegills is there? How much prey do they need? You end up with small, slow-growing bluegills when there are too many bluegills. That is why I keep "preaching" the importance of largemouth bass to control bluegill numbers so there is enough food to go around for the survivors and then they will grow fast and reach large size.

Of course it also helps if you have a water body, pit or pond, with a diversity of habitat and a diversity of prey for bluegills to eat. A pond with good water quality and a variety of aquatic vegetation is probably going to have lots of different food items for the bluegills to eat. So, I would say the best way to naturally increase the food sources is to make sure you have clean water and good aquatic habitat--the rest will take care of itself.

There is another option that can be used and that is to supplementally feed the bluegills. There are a variety of automatic feeders that can be filled with fish feed and that intensive managemet strategy is another one that can be used to produce some big bluegills.

So, I would say the best way to naturally increase the food sources is to make sure you have clean water and good aquatic habitat--the rest will take care of itself.

This answered my question on a certain sandpit I fish... thanks again Daryl.


There's a sandpit I've been fishing all my life... 40+ years. It's routinely stocked with bass, catfish, bluegills, ocassionally northern and crappie. The gills in that lake have never gotten over 7" inches in this pit. Atleast that's the largest I've ever caught. It does have a carp/buffalo problem and the river does flood it once in awhile. Which really funks the water up and sometimes causes fish kills. There's really not alot of vegetation except in the spring. That's only if we have a wet spring like this year. I guess it's probably never going to be great gill lake. Atleast it has some huge crappie.