Ok.......well, my pond is doing well. Teaming with life. My bream are growing like crazy. I stocked 50 largemouth bass from American Sportfish , 11 days ago. They were beautiful bass too. All of them were 9-11 inches long and fat and healthy. Just beautiful. F1 strain Tiger bass.

I only put in 50.

I have found that I have either blue catfish or channel catfish, which I did not put in there. I havent been able to get my hybrid stripers yet because it's too hot.

But today........I found that I have a very large shoal of the fish in the photo below. I didn't put this in there either.

The bass are tearing them up.....even some of the larger bream are hitting on them. But I'm pretty sure that it's not good to have these.

I think it's a shad. I kinda hoped it was a threadfin shad because I have no way to get rid of these fish.

The tail is yellow/gold. they are about an inch and a half long.

I'm almost sure that this is the kind of shad that grows to 3 pounds. But it does look like a threadfin.

So what do you guys think? Probably a Gizzard shad, and I'm sure I don't have enough predators in there to handle them. If I had known these were in my pond 2 weeks ago , I would have added 100 bass.

I plan on stocking at least 60-75 Hybrid stripers as soon as I can get my hands on them.

Here it is.
What is it?

Looks like a fathead minnow to me.

Fathead minnow

Seems much larger than a fathead minnow. Some of them are approaching 3 inches. and the shoal is HUGE.

I hope it is a fathead minnow, they guy I bought the fathead minnows from told me that he has seen his get 3.5 inches and better.


I never thought of that though. They may well be fathead minnows.

my fatheads look "plumper" -- like Jason 007s example, and also a lighter colored back, but that may be due to differences between our ponds. I have fatheads that are ~3"


That does not appear to be the correct body configuration of either juvenile threadfin or gizzard shad.

I vote FHM, lets see what the experts say

Oh heck male fatheads can get bigger than 3 inches. I've had 4 to 5 inch fatheads.

It's fathead minnows. I did not know.
You see my pond has the conventional minnow in it as well, which I thought was a fathead minnow. I have millions of those.

And then for the first time today, I saw THESE.
These are the fathead minnows that I bought like 10,000 of.
But I have never really seen them and of course they are HUGE compared to the regular native minnow.

I didn't take pictures of the shoals until later in the day after I caught and photographed a specimen.

What you see here is Nothing...........compared to the huge shoals I was looking at around 2:00 pm. They were like 30 feet long and 20 feet wide, looked like millions of these things. And there were shoals all over the pond in different places.

I freaked out ............there's literally millions of these things. Huge Shoals.

The bass have plenty to eat.

Jason, I also had the huge schools of FHM earlier this summer. I think the LMB have made short work of them or else they have scattered and went deeper because I only see half grown fry in the shallows now.

Most of the school I was looking at yesterday on various schools........the majority of the minnows were deeper but you could see them when they flashed their sides 2 or 3 feet under water.

Yesterday was the first time I saw these minnows and you know for them to be the size that they are, they have been there for a while.

I only put 50 bass in my pond because I'm going for big bass.
I don't see them wiping out all these minnows. There are just too many. I may be able to put 10 or 15 or 50 more bass.

Remember.....a single LMB will consume 10 lbs of those minnows just to gain one pound.

Jason, if you want correct advice on here you're going to have to put the correct area where you live. You don't have to put the city, but if you continue to put the incorrect area because you are paranoid you will be getting incorrect advice.

Advice on what to stock in New York is going to be completely different than what to stock in Louisiana. Different species of fish live down South that cannot live up North. If we don't know what state you are in, stocking Coppernose BG and Florida or F1 Hybrid LMB will not be advised because they'll either die in waters that get ice covered or will do very poorly in cold water.

So Esshup your saying he's not in NY? Or he is in NY and doesn't know better to stock F1's? Jason you say it's to hot to get your HSB? It's like 68 in NY right now? I don't think that's to hot....

Esshup is right. Location is key! That would be like me asking what I should stock in my pond and my profile says NY but I am actually in Arkansas.... It don't work that way.

RC

Here's Jason's first post:

IP address is south La.

Hmmm ok that would expain the F1's then, and it being to hot to get HSB...

Jason not sure what your doing here but like Esshup said your not gonna get any advise from folks or worse yet wrong advise from folks if your not telling us at least the state you live in......

RC

Jason said that he is from Louisiana. He didn't say that his pond is here. He might be an escapee.

That's true, but the fish that he has in his pond won't do very well in N.Y.