As long as you have a healthly population of gizzard shad they will compete with the young bluegill for the same food. Gizzard shad filter feed and they remove a lot of the food lower food chain out of the lake and tie it up into gizzard shad biomass. Only the very huge bass can eat a full grown gizzard shad from what I understand. Patoka Lake use to have large bluegills and good numbers of gill before the lake had Gizzard Shad introduced. If only they were threadfin shad and not Gizzard Shad. Only Gibson and maybe turtle creek with their warm water power plant hot water discharges into those lake can sustain a threadfin shad population though our cold IN winters. But hey with global warming being declared a reality these days maybe we can plant some threadfins in the IN water and they may survive year round.

Gills suspend down amoung the trees and if there water is very clear you can find some big sunfish in 20 or 30ft of water nesting. A rock quarry near Dawson Spring, KY had some huge bluegills that spawned on a steep 45 deg slope that entered the rock quarry and dropped down into 50ft of water. I found the big gills nests in 20ft of water while scuba diving in the rock quarry. But that was way back in the 1970's. Today it's sport diving quarry full of big catfish. When I dove it there were huge bass that were mostly 3 to 4 lbs in size and I also saw one big 8 to 10 # that was hanging out all by herself. She would not let me get very close to her and there was no way I could catch her with just fins.

Regards,

Moose1am