Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose Stocking schedule question

Can you get pellet trained YP close to your house? Will they sell you a mix of sizes? I would say if you could get a few in the 6-8" range and especially if you could get them now when females are loaded with eggs you would only need a small stocking population up front. IF you could get some gravid females say 20-25 in the 6-8" range, then maybe 100 in the 3-6 range along with your forage order this fall you would be set. As long as no predators went in till next fall the YP would make millions of babies come spring and if water quality and temps are good for successful hatching of eggs you will have millions of fry to grow out all of next year.

of course the fry do better with the backbone of the micronutrients (think green water, and all the little critters that make up the food chain) in place. That sometimes isn't something you can count in on a new pond since new ponds tend to be muddy for a while from the clay. This slows down the building of the food chain till the water clears.

Be sure to try to get several types of shiners (there are many kinds besides golden shiners but GSH will do well as are easy to source from various bait dealers or fish farms), FHM, crayfish, ghost shrimp, gammarus species (scuds) etc.

I have found it very rewarding to have a forage only pond with YP and only a few RES. The kids have fun hand feeding the YP and although the FHM only lasted a season and the the GSH population strugged for a bit to have successful recruiting, now in year 3 we finally are seeing minnow clouds and surface feeding that is just starting to go crazy.

I thought waiting this long would be too hard but now we finally are in a position to plan for the apex predator. The YP and GSH seem to coexist well and I'm sure the YP are helping control the tiny RES progeny as well as we don't seem to have much RES recruitment.

Others have considered bowfin as a predator, you may want to see what you can source locally in ponds/rivers for forage and predators. I imagine you could probably source lots of chubs and suckers?

Research Lake Chubsucker (LCS) as some of us here have used that as an alternate forage as well. If your pond can maintain clear water with vegetation it would be a good place to see if you can establish the LCS.