Greg, we didn't stock in one of them; when we were standing on the bank of the other one, as the hatchery guy was staring at the meter ominously, I asked him more than once if we should put those bass in another pond instead. But I have this broken part of my brain that sometimes allows me to do really, really dumb stuff even though I fully realize while I'm doing it that it is really, really dumb (probably a hangover from my first three years of undergrad, pun intended). So for some inexplicable reason he released the 20 bass into the half-acre pond, and they did indeed immediately start coming up to the surface for air.
I went back the day after that and the day after that to look for floaters or ones that had washed up on the bank, and didn't see any; I know it's very possible they just sank, or got eaten by a raccoon/possum/turtle/etc.
But when we got to the second pond with low DO, thankfully I was able to summon enough intelligence to not hesitate to tell him we would just stock those in the pond with the 6ppm, which is horrendously overpopulated with the most stunted bluegill I've ever seen anyway so the LMB are having a big party in there right about now I would say.
Both of these ponds have steep banks all around them, and heavy growth of trees all along the bank; they're both old pits over 70 years old, and both have muck bottoms; I just today noticed that the larger pond has a good bit of leaves built up on the bottom. Could all of that combined with a very heavy blanket of watermeal dying, combine to cause DO levels that low? If it's still not probable, any ideas what could be causing it? Both ponds have had great fishing in years past, but they've both been covered with watermeal for several years now and the landowner had just given up on them.
