Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations ond

have a small 7 acre pond depth ranging to 35 ft.when i bought this place the pond was loaded with stunted green sunfish. i stocked 900 lmb and 300 we to try to reduce sunfish numbers. after 2 years lmb and we are big and healthy. i'm now thinking about adding some hybred bluegils but concerned they may become prey whaddya think

Adding any type of sport fish to the pond for good survival will depend on the larger sizes of your current LMbass. Good survival of HBG will be if they are AT LEAST 3 times shorter than the bigger bass. So catch and measure lengths of your larger bass. Divide that length by 3 and this is the MINIMUM size of HBG you should stock. If you don't follow this rule then expect a lot of the stocker HBG to become fish food. Smaller HBG can be grown in a net pen (aka cage), fed out for several months to gain 1"-1.5" and then released. Plus if your greenies(GSF) are noticeably low density and their average size is increasing to harvestable sizes 7"-9" then I would remove some of the LMB before adding the HBG. Too many predators per acre can be a disadvantage.

In your 7 acre pond you added 900+300 = 1200/7ac =abt 170/ac. With a relative balance of predator and panfish then 100 LMB per acre should now be adequate. Sometimes when the pond has lots of weed growth (35%-50%) of the surface area more bass / ac are needed to get adequate predation of smaller fish. Reducing bass density will keep them growing better compared to if there were 150+ bass /ac. When the bass are not growing at least 0.5" per year then there are too many bass per ac unless the goal is crowded slow growing bass. All this depends on the goals for the pond and condition of the pond (habitat & water quality) and fishery.

Great info above ...

Might be good to add some BG , and /or YP , not HBG. I would think with that many predator fish the GSF are not going to last long in terms of keeping them all fed well. You are going to need some regular BG to help fill the forage void in the years to come.

Eventually I think you will want to introduce some advance size BG / YP and start culling some of the LMB.

YP populations historically struggle in fisheries with presence of LMB.

Good point TJ,

Rwermy -I think regular BG is the way to go if you want to add bluegill .

If you add any fish (other than those to big to be eaten)the habituate them when added.

Look at the links below for info.


http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.ph...ite_id=1#import

http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.ph...=true#Post26019