best from today

I guided a guy from Lenoir City in east Tennessee today. Here are pictures of the best fish:

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Those are nice!

Huge gills for sure.

Boy Howdey!!

Thanks, guys!

Those are some monsters

Monster gill, is that lake known for those big gills?

Josh, it's not a lake but a private pond, all of one acre in size. I have a pond and lake management company, one of the services of which is a trophy bluegill guide service; I guide on a handful of ponds in middle Tennessee. The ponds are mostly ones that I have intensively managed for trophy bluegill for the past six years. All of the fish in the photos above came from the same one-acre pond. So far this year it has produced roughly forty bluegill over a pound, about twenty over 20 ounces, and four over 24 ounces. The second-biggest fish was caught by my last guide party on May 6 and weighed 30.6 ounces.

Beautiful, I love small pond fishing. I plan to manage for trophy gills as well

Yikes! I thought my one pounder last year was impressive, now I have a new goal!

Nice Gills!!

What type of bait were you using?

The two-pounder was caught on a whole live nightcrawler. Some of the other fish were caught on redworms; the two biggest apart from the two-pounder were caught on Crappie Sliders.

Purdy fishies for sure. I love em, those are awesome! Keep the pics coming.

How old are those fish and what is the growth rate

I have only been working with this particular pond since 2009, and the bluegill were badly overpopulated and averaged about 3" when I began working with it; the average lifespan of a bluegill is only six years, so it's unlikely that any of these fish were ones that were in the pond in 2009. I transferred sixty 6" coppernose from another pond on the same property in 2012; those fish were one year old at the time, so most likely the big coppernose pictured above are three to four years old. I say three to four because we've been catching a lot this year that look to be part coppernose and part northern-strain; there were northern-strain bluegill in the pond when I began working with it, and clearly the two strains have been interbreeding.

Do you age them from the otoliths

Getting an otolith would require killing the fish. Needless to say, that ain't happening with these fish.