Perhaps I'm naive - but I hardly see people catching bass putting them in a live well (unless they're in a tournament) or on a stringer, let alone keeping them. I'd venture a guess that smaller ponds frequented by ice-fisherman (using mostly live bait) are under the most pressure, both from harvesting fish and from gut-hooking related mortality.

I know I don't have the breadth of experience that some members on this site have with different bodies of water in CT, but I don't see much difference between the "managed" lakes I've fished in CT and the rest. The lakes with the strongest forage base (ie alewife lakes like Candlewood, Lilli and Waramaug) seem to have the more robust bass populations while also supporting predator stocking programs (trout, walleye and pike) which compete directly with the bass for forage. These lakes are ideal for the forage, and so without any slot limits the bass and their competition mutually thrive, granted dissolved oxygen levels and temperature seem to be putting negative pressure on the cold-water predators lately.

Having read a few articles about private managed ponds, the successful ponds are designed to support the targeted primary forage base, with structure added to provide habitat for the bass in the final stages of construction. CT tries to manage the fisheries by addressing the predators - ie protected slot limits, dumping in adult trout, rather than studying the prey and designing the management program to target the prey. Top it off, there are accounts all over this forum this year of surreptitious efforts to deploy chemical-based weed killers being made throughout the state this year on lakes which have dams that could be used to drive weeds off shore by exposing the bottom of the lake to the frost, as has been done with such success on Candlewood in the last 10 years or so.

Sounds to me like the state's current management strategy is bass-ackwards of what it should be - regulating virtually non-existent consumption and active efforts to destroy predator/prey habitat. I'm not proposing spreading invasive prey, but perhaps a zoo-plankton breeding program (stocked during the bass-spawn to kick-start fry growth) or golden-shiner stocking program in these lakes currently subject to slot limits might yield greater results. They would benefit the entire fishery, not just the apex predators - but other desirable game/consumption fish such as perch and crappie as well, which in turn increase the forage base for the apex predators. Given the mortality rates of predatory fish from birth to adulthood any program designed to raise prey will be far more cost-effective/efficient.