Iowa 1.5 acre pond, 2.5 years old channel cats, redear, fhm, lm bass, hybrid bluegill, crappie, windmill aeration


we had a hard winter, never lost my aeration hole but had up to 20" of ice on most of the pond, ice just got off yesterday, only one dead redear floating

my question is--- did i survive winter that well or did fish die and sink? will winter kill fish sink and disappear? how can i be sure i came through such a brutal winter, i had more die than that last year but they all floated

i had an otter for about 2 weeks last fall and i hope he didn't do too much damage before he moved on, but i was expecting to see some floaters this spring

how much snow was on the ice in terms of depth and time frame? That can be more impactful than anything.

From what I've seen, many will float but I'm sure several sink too.

Nice to see Iowa folks on here

matzilla, how does your pond look? i am in tama, like i said my ice is off, and no floating fish, so i am hopeful. seen some small fish in the shallows.

we had about 8" of melted/refrozen hard pack snow on top of the ice, but only for 30-40 days and i always had a 30' aerator hole open

When I had it happen, everything floated and was frozen in the ice except the LMB. The bass all died (around a hundred) & I never saw a single one of them - sunk like stones I guess. It turned out only one single CC survived and I didn't realize it until a couple of years later. That was a nice size fish!

Vast majority of morts sink...many that float and make it to shore are harvested by scavengers overnight, so it's hard to determine the extent of a kill event if judging by floating morts. I'd guess less than 10% of morts would ever be witnessed based on my experience.