Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Help Golden Shiners in a public lake?

how do golden shiners get to be huge in my public lake or how do they even get there

They probably have ideal habitat and less predators than a smaller pond. I'll bet they were part of a leftover minnow bucket and the angler just dumped the minnows in the lake after they were done fishing.

GSH are also native to much of eastern and middle America. There is also a good likelihood they were present in what ever stream was dammed up to make that lake... Once they lake was form, they gladly made it a home as well. Some of the biggest GSH I've ever caught were caught near where people feed the ducks and geese with bread at a couple local lakes.

If you build a pond and never put fish in it, nature will stock it for you. I've built numerous Koi ponds and ended up with all kinds of species of fish that were never introduced by humans.

What species have you seen appear and how do you think they got there? I've never experienced natural stocking in any pond that was isolated for other bodies of water.

Fish eggs will stick to the feet of wading birds. If you purchase plants for ponds, sometimes they have fish eggs in them. A farmer friend of ours stocked a pond with channel cats and 10 years later, not only was there channel cats, there was largemouth bass in the pond!

Lets think about this. If the eggs are stuck to the feet of wading birds then how do the eggs get off the feet for introduction to the new pond? Have you ever tried pulling a 'stuck' fish egg from a stone in a BG nest? Pretty tough project. Although firstly, how do the eggs get on the feet of wading birds in the first place? Fresh fish eggs are sticky for only a very short time, then they are 'unsticky'. I doubt the fish eating bird allows fish to spawn on their legs/feet without the hungry bird eating the 'dumb' fish. What keeps delicate fish eggs from their outer membrane drying out and 'killing' the eggs as the bird is flying from pond to pond? Try taking fish eggs out of the water for about a minute or two and see how well they hatch. Drying out is not a good thing for fish eggs.

Jeez Bill you're so skeptical, you'd think you were a scientist or something.

Next you're gonna tell us that you don't believe in the Chupacabra.

Thanks. Skeptical is my job. We try not to put out miss information nor 'wives or tall tales' on this Forum.

Speak for yourself.

Okay, Okay a few tall tales are allowed. However, fish eggs are off limits.

How about giant, man-eating, freshwater cephalopods???

I know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy, that actually caught one in a public BOW.......... had to release it though. It was a female, and only 10 "hands" from outstretched tip of tentacle to opposing tentacle.........

Fish get into new bodies of water 99.9999% of the time by two ways... Man puts them there, either purposely or accidentally or the natural way which is via stream capture or flood events.

I've tried to get BG eggs to stick to a ducks foot. They didn't. They also don't stick to feathers.

You've got waaaaaaaay to much idle time on your hands. LOL! Why don't you see if you can get fish eggs to stick to water drinking lizards while you're at it....... As far as fish eggs being transplanted from pond to pond, I don't know for certain how it happens, but it happens and I've personally witnessed fish varieties in ponds that were not intentionally introduced by man.

Bob, what about unintentionally or by flooding/high water? What varities of fish were they? I think this would be a good topic for MythBusters! (but they'd probably never air it - no "WOW" factor)

Bob, I have both too much time and too much curiosity. I bought a duck at a flea market, killed it and took off a foot and some feathers. I went to my big BG bedding area and started trying to get the eggs to stick both or either. They didn't.

If birds stocked fish, the Arkansas fish breeders would be hosed. However, I guess anything is possible.

And now we can get into hogs manure sealing leaky ponds.

Just think about it...a 1/4" fry can swim for miles in any direction in water less than 1/16" deep. They can also swim upstream in amazingly strong currents. Birds don't need to stock fish, fish spread to new waters very well all on their own.

Short of a high waterfall, you'd be amazed how small of a stream and fast a current aa number of species can ascend. You'd also be amazed at how often people stock fish into ponds they don't have permission to stock let alone fish.

A friend of ours has two ponds, one small one uphill from the larger main pond. The small upper pond has blacknose crappie in it. No crappie were stocked in the main pond. In August I caught two crappie in a matter of a few minutes. Shocked, I walked to the area between the two ponds. Only thing plausible is the smallest of trickle drainage coming out of the small pond. It's incredible the highways fish find between waters.

How often have you seen kids walking down the road with a fishing pole in one hand and a bucket in the other?

Razor wire and electric fencing...

These Koi ponds were built by me. We purchased some various aquatic plants that were submerged in water at time of purchase. I'm not a "fishologist", but we did end up with some fish that weren't Koi. Maybe the fish eggs were in the the plants???????? As far as our farmer friend, he didn't have a clue as to how the LMB's got in his pond. His pond is bowl shaped with no other ponds to drain into it. He owned a couple hundred head of dairy cows that used the pond for water. I'm not a scientist, but it is my belief that nature just finds a way. I have bullfrogs around my pond and I never introduced them, either. While it was never my intent to spread misinformation, I was just offering up what I had been told more than once. How mother nature works is still a mystery to me. If man didn't put the fish there and the pond was never flooded by a larger body of water, stream, or river, then how did the fish get there? I'm all ears.

........Thunderstorms? Tornadic thunderstorms happen in Oklahoma all the time. They will pass over large bodies of water and suck up tens of thousands of gallons of water and deposit it farther away. Is it possible that this could be how fish are spread from one body of water to another? Sometimes you need to think outside of the box to find your answers to life's mysteries.

African swallows? Maybe! But certainly not European swallows...