Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose New lake, 3.5 acres

No, you need to harvest more bass.

There's a thing called carrying capacity, or standing crop. One pond, one acre in size can only hold so many fish (in pounds). For an aerated, fed pond, lets go with around 750 pounds per surface acre. You could push things more and get more pounds, but as a new pond manager, you need to be in tune with the ecosystem and react quickly to adverse conditions. If not, you could have a massive fish kill if something goes wrong (say you lost power for a week in the middle of summer and the aeration system wasn't working). So, lets start a ways away from the ragged edge so to speak.

O.K. 750 pounds of fish per acre.

Each LMB needs to eat roughly 10 pounds of fish to put on one pound of weight. So, 100 LMB per acre needs to eat 1,000 pounds of fish per year per acre, not including the weight of the LMB. Plus you have to have fish left over to spawn. Now with feeding you can mitigate some of that 1,000# of fish, more than likely bringing it down to only needing 700-750 pounds of fish for the LMB to eat (maybe less depending on how well they eat pellets), but that doesn't leave a lot in reserve to spawn and make new forage fish for next year. See where I'm going? Now if you had only 50 LMB in that acre, you would only need 500# of fish. That leaves plenty of fish to spawn the next year.

There's a pretty good thread in the archives on carrying capacity. That will help you understand it a bit better than my cliff notes.