Well I am orginally from Maryland but I go to school in Louisiana but due to the hurricane im home for about a week ,

During the summer me and my buddy fish his private pond behind his house, Its quite a big pond we have access to a canoe with trolling motor and we get around it pretty well.

When I came back this weekend I realized that the water was a lot lower than normal and very very clear. Come to find out it hasnt rained in quite awhile ,

Over the last few days ive caught quite a bit of fish they seem to be biting more than normal but I found one thing disturbing, I caught about Five fish that were decent size they had a big head and all that but the body of this fish was super skinny like i could see the bones, I hadnt seen this before. It looked almost like a dog that was starvin i could see the outline of their back bone and all that .

All of the fish that were caught like this were in one area of the pond , Half of the pond is surrounded by boat docks and houses the other half is surrounded by trees and cat tails. All of the sick lookings fish were caught on the side with houses.

Im no expert so i was just wondering if you think there is something wrong with the pond or if it not healthy.

I have never found anything like this at all. That seems very weird. :-?

In many public lakes the fish get very skinny in late summer. It's due to lack of food. They will feed up in the fall.

What's the primary food for the bass in that lake?

Lack of forage in warm water high metabolism times is probably the reason....Also a sign of issues with predator and prey species out of balance.

Big O

BTW Welcome to the group Lambo6, hope you're enjoying the forum....we sure do!

WELCOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There are some lakes I fish (i.e. Lake Powell) that get this problem.  The fish will eat up all the shad for a few years, then starve for a couple years after that as the shad populations make a come back.  It works in cycles.  They ask us to harvest those starving fish.

Mostly it is due to the striper in this lake, but happens to the other species as well.

From my experiences, this is probably one of several possible things. You mentioned five fish. Are there more that aren't thin? It is probably a dynamics problem between predator fish and the lack of prey. It probably won't go away unless something changes...such as harvest of the thin fish and a focused effort to increase and improve the food chain.

If these five fish are a fraction of what you caught and the rest are healthy looking, then there is a different problem. It could be these individual fish have lost their food chain. Here's what I mean. Some bass are conditioned to certain areas of a lake or pond and the food sources which live there. Bass don't have the ability to think or reason...they respond to their instincts and conditioning. If, for example, several bass feed primarily on medium size bluegill and they run out of food, they can lose weight rather than leave to hunt. At the same time, other bass are accustomed to hunting and chasing. The third case could be some kind of obstruction in the digestive system of those individual fish.

In any of these cases, it is best to remove extremely thin bass from the system. The odds of them recovering are staggering against them. And, if they do, they've lost months, maybe years of growth potential that they can't regain.