Greetings,

I've got a bit of a leach issue in our pond. The pond is used for swimming and fishing. However since our kids or 8,6,5,3, mom freaks out a bit when they come out with a leach on them. Help please.

Thank you!

I added crayfish to my little leach infested pond I rarely see any now. Fish will each them too. Perhaps Yellow perch? Or a sunfish of some sort. What fish dO you have in it now?

Based on what I've read here and elsewhere I'd say with a pond that size there won't be a cost-effective method to eliminate the leeches...controlling via predation would be your best solution as Bobby suggests. I'll leave it to the experts to recommend the best species to do so.

Based solely on experience, I would add fat head minnows (for forage base and mosquito eating) and yellow perch for leeches, snails, and the things snails host.

We have perch in the pond, along with walleye, black crappie, and fathead minnows. I have yet to see a leech or a snail since putting them in. Beforehand, we had thousands of snails.

A neighbor down the road has a bass/bream pond and cannot go swimming in it for all of the leeches. He is going to add a few perch to see how it goes, but his bass may be too large for the perch to establish a population to control leeches.

Thank you all for your thoughts.

We recently bought the property last fall and the fish population was way out of balance. Had high numbers of small LMB and only a few HBG. So i harvested some smaller bass and started stocking the pond. My current holdings are LMB with a limited population of Hybrid BG. Just last fall and this summer, I've added about 700 Northern bluegil, 200 RSF, and about 90lbs of Fathead minnows. To help balance the pond.

All this said to say, I'm not sure how well the yellow perch would do in my small pond with all my recent additions. Secondly, I'm in southern indiana, wouldn't water temp get outside of the ideal temperature for YP?

Bill Cody will be the best guy to give you advice on YP. From what I have gathered from reading his posts, and others, You might be able to stock YP if they are big enough to avoid predation by the LMB. You would need to restock every so often, because of life expectancy of the YP and no reproduction of the YP because of the LMB.