Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose Yellow Perch, Northern Pike?

I have a small 1 acre pond last year I transplanted around 40-50 six-eight inch YP. Its a fairly shallow pond probably 12 feet at the deepest. Most is 6-8 feet. The pond is at the water table so the water level is always constant. Whats the opinion out there on adding either LMB, or Northern Pike. What about just keeping nothing but YP in it. I realize if I did decide to put LMB or NP I would wait awhile and they would be small. The pond has cattails and a few trees around it. Also a fair amount of bottom growth. Thanks!

I would keep it just yellow perch until you have bunches and bunches of them and cant keep up with reproduction any longer. Then I would add either 100 walleye and 5 pike or would do a combo of 75 smallmouth bass and 25 hybrid striped bass. You could do up to about 100 largemouth if you want, I just don't like em very much so I am very biased in my suggestions.

Why is there currently no other fish in the pond? Or is there?

There are no other fish in there, thats by choice i wanted to get a good base of YP first but I am afraid without any predator the YP will stunt. I already have a pond of LMB/YP. So I was thinking NP would be cool. I have concerns Walleye would survive in the pond but I could be wrong, Im not interested in striped or small mouth thats just my bias.

NP are really cool, but its hard to support very many of them to make it worth angling for as a main predator in a small pond. If you are fine with growing a bunch of 2 lb pike you could plop in about 50 of them or so. Or try 15-25 of them and see how they do? I wouldnt worry too much about YP overpopulating if you use pike as a predator, but def wait till the forage base is on the verge of stunting.

I think walleye will be fine, you can always throw a handful in there as guinea pigs......

Thanks for the opinion, a friend of mine uses YP as a forage base for NP and it seems to work good granted his pond is about 9 acres. I really dont have a problem with a small number of NP. If I could grow a few big ones out of it and keep my YP numbers down enough I should be able to get some nice YP too. Any other Opinions? How many NP and how big if I do go that route.

A 1 acre pond would struggle to support more than a handful of adult NP. Personally I think YP and WE are a more realistic combination. Do you have any forage fish there currently? FHM, GSH, etc...

No Nothing but Perch right now.

You may want to at least add FHM and possibly GSH. Short of your YP eating invertebrates, what are they feeding on? YP, especially those over 6" become rather piscavorous, in the absence of any forage fish they aren't going to do very well... Do a forum search on YP, there is a plethora of information on this forum about them. Bill Cody also know of Dr. Perca probably knows about about growing jumbo YP in small ponds than anyone and has added large amounts of information to the forum about them... Lots of reading to do! When I first came to the forum it took me weeks of back reading all the previous posts to really get at all the info there is...

Thanks Ill continue to do more research on here I love this site.