Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Creating habitat new stocking ideas

My wife bought me a sub this year and we read every word the first day it shows up, Great mag. We built a 1+ acre pond last sept, stocked it with LMB, bluegill, fatheads, & channel. We feed our gills and channel, but our bass rarely will take the floating food. We started saining crawdads, catching jars full of grasshoppers and buying night crawlers for our bass. They feed on all of these just as fast as you drop em in the water, what a kick.. We started going out in our boat to feed them and they follow us all around the pond, several will take a worm right out of your hand when you hang it in the water. This whole experance has been a life long dream for us and we are loving every minute of it. Now for my questions. We just finished construction on our second pond it will be 2+ acres (not full yet). We are located in South central Kansas, 20 mile from Oklahoma line. The pond averages 10-12 feet deep, is sandy dirt on the surface with clay as you get deeper and shale in the deepest bottom. There is a small spring that feeds it with additional run off from natural grass land. We added 5 big cedar trees to the bottom, tied down with cinder blocks, we have about 200 more cinder blocks we intend on scattering, and the water will flood about 20 cedar trees about 1 foot deep. We intend on dumping a semi load of 1-2 inch rock along one bank, and scattering a couple semi loads of sand alond the remainder of that bank. We would like to stock this pond with Wiper, Walleye, Smallmouth,and Tilapia. Will this mix work for us?? I have read everything I can find on this sight regarding Walleye & SMB, I understand crawfish and frogs for the SMB, and I understand fatheads will only last a couple years before they are all eaten, so what do we stock for forage for the Walleye & Wipers? Can we get the Wipers, SMB & Walleye to feed on floating food?

Welcome to Pond Boss, Roost and Boo,

Since it is obvious that you are doing your homework you may want to be informed that "wipers" are often referred to on this site as striped bass hybrids or "SBH". If you research a little more you will find dozens, if not hundreds of posts on feeding your wipers.

In answer to your question, "will they take floating food".

Wipers or "SBH"--Yes, Always
Smallmouth Bass--Maybe, Sometimes
Walleye--No, never (at least I'm unaware of this working)

I'll defer to someone else to address your questions regarding whether or not this particular mix has potential.

Bruce

R&B - As Bruce mentioned HSB will readily eat fish pellets. Almost every HSB that you can buy has been raised on pellets, thus from the time you get them they know what pellets are, where to look for them, and find them.

BUT with SMB and walleye, it is a very different matter.

SMB with the correct technique can be trained to eat pellets but most SMB you buy from hatcheries are not trained to eat pellets. If you want trained SMB you have to hunt or search hatcheries for them or train them yourself. A few midwest-eastern hatcheries have pellet trained SMB.

Walleye that are pellet trained are even more difficult to locate than SMB. They are very rare do to difficulty in training them to accept pellets.

The quickess & easiest way to get your current LMB to eat pellets is to replace them with LMB that are pellet feed trained. If you concur, then I would fish out of your pond the bass that are "least friendly". These fish are the ones that do not follow you around and are "the wildest" or least tame. For overy one of those you take out replace it with a pellet trained bass. The pellet trained bass will help train the friendly bass to convert to pellets. Converting friendly bass to pellets is "doable" especially if you use softened pellets that have been enlarged by forming small balls or wads by compressing several soft pellets together. This softened, flavorful, "wad" or ball then sinks. Bass quickly accept it.

Doesn't your water get too cold for talapia to survive winter?.

You should look into adding golden shiners and some other forage fish. Allow the shiners to establish and get 6"-8" before adding predators. HSB, SMB and walleye are all fish predators and you will need either quite a large forage base/supply to feed all these predators, or very few predators and their resultant offspring to keep all adequately growing. Keep in mind that there should be 6 to 10 pounds of forage fish ALWAYS present for every predator. Some of the SMB and HSB will go "off feed" and about 50% to 75% of the SMB offspring will NOT learn to eat pellets.

If you allow adequate weed cover to establish and maintain it, this may provide enough cover for long term survival of forage fish.

I know very little about the Tilapia, but I've read they are good eating and a good forage food as well, I've never even seen one, and don't know what they require for survival or what they eat, (Please help me understand them). We are just looking for differant variaties to setup our second pond. I did know that LMB can be trained and our hatchery has a few available every spring, but didn't have any at the time that we stocked our first pond. Our first pond is in excellent condition and our real focus is on establishing alternative species on our second pond. I've read a lot about NOT stocking shiners, because they quickly become a preditor themselves, we need more input on our spiecies choices and WHAT is the best forage for these spieces. We will always feed our fish, because we really enjoy watching them, but we would like to make sure there is natural prey for all the preditors as well. I'm not opposed to netting several hundred shad ever summer to feed them, but I understand shad can't live in freezeing unrunning water, so we need an alternative forage for our walleye, especially. If we add a lot of crawdads & frogs for the smallies, and feed our Wipers, I still need something for the walleye. If shineres are the answer fine, but I have read so much negetive about putting them in a pond that it concerns me.

Tilapia don't winter at all well. Cold water pretty well does them in. They are, however, extremely prolific. So prolific that I worry about biomass problems during the summer. Then you can possibly have a big mess when they die off in the winter. I'd stick to bluegill as a renewable source of protien.

I have a concern about your present pond. You mention that you stocked bluegill. However, you don't say how many or what the forage base consists of at this time. The only time I've ever seen largemouths follow me around the bank was when they were starving. Throwing grasshoppers should generate bluegill strikes, not bass. You may be ready for a major problem. However, I could be misreading the situation.

When the first pond filled up, we stocked the following, April 2004.
1. Bass 75 @ 4-6 inch
2. Hybrid Bluegill, 300 @ 3-4 inch
3. Native bluegill, 25 @ 4–6 inch
4. Redear, 75 @ 1-3 inch
5. Fathead Minnows, @ 8lbs
What we didn't know at that time is that the hybrid bluegills are 90% male. So, September 2004, we stocked 25 Channel 9 -15” (so we could watch them feed) and 150 native bluegill 5-7”. We see some small gills 1 – 3”, some other small unidentifiable minnows 1-2” and, small 1-3” bass, along the vegetation at the edges.

Prior to the warnings I read about shiners, I had thrown in dozens of shiners I bought at the bait shop, just for the fun of watching them get attacked (probably 300 early this spring 2-3”), we have also added/fed no less then 1000 crawdads, our pond has an abundance of chirp frogs, leopard frogs and bull frogs. I really don't believe our bass are starving, but merely spoiled, actually they chase the bluegill off from THEIR food, except the dead crickets and grasshoppers, they only want the live ones, and will only allow the gills to take the dead.

Again, I want to re-emphasis that we would like to hear some expertise on the species mix we are considering and forage requirements, for Walleye, SMB & Wipers for our new pond. I was considering the Tilapia, but maybe that isn't the best choice, we need to understand what will work best with these fish, and get some assurance that Walleye, Wiper & SMB, is an expectable mix.