Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose stocking new pond

hello,

This is my first time posting. I have recently put a small pond beside my home. I didn't have much property to use so I had to make it small. It measures 105 ft. long by 68 ft. wide and the deepest point will be 12 ft. It now has about 2 ft. of water in it. I would love to stock it with bigger fish so that it can be fished right away instead of putting fingerlings in. To start with I am only going to put large mouth and blue gill in. Can I stock bigger fish right away? I've been told I should put fingerlings in so they can all grow together. What are your opinons? If I do put bigger fish in to start can I put fingerlings in later or will they all be eaten? Any help will be appreciated.

thanks

ball44,

Welcome to the Forum. By your dimensions, your pond is less than .2 of an acre. It will be difficult for a pond that size to support very many LMB. The generally accepted rule of thumb for a pond's LMB carrying capacity is about 100 pounds per acre. In your case that means about 16 or 17 pounds of LMB max. You indicated you wished to stock large LMB...let's say you stocked 4 LMB of 4 pounds each. That means those 4 bass have maxed out your carrying capacity. You can probably expect to catch those 4 bass maybe once or twice a year on lures, perhaps more often on live bait, but not much more often. If you are satisfied with catching 4 fish once or twice a year, then maybe this is the way for you to go.

Many people would not be happy with that. Then you must also consider that LMB are very prolific and you would need to remove virtually all LMB under 4 pounds or your remaining fish will loose weight, become stunted, and even perhaps die.

I'd like to encourage you to carefully think about your objectives for this pond. If you still wish to stock large LMB, then you must pay very careful attention to the forage base. Get your BG in first along with some fathead minnows. It would be a waste of money to stock fingerlings later as they will all be consumed by the LMB.

A couple of options that you might consider, if you are still intent on LMB. One is to carefully stock only female LMB. That way you will eliminate the reproduction worries...but you have to be sure to only stock female LMB. The other option to consider is stocking pellet trained LMB and artificially feeding them. There are mixed reports of large LMB continuing to eat pellet feed as they mature, generally they do not.

If you want to consider other approaches rather than the LMB route, there are several open to you which have been tried by folks on the Forum.

I stocked larger fish for many reasons. 1) I wanted an immediate spawn, and fishery. 2) I wanted to introduce only fish with superior Relative Weights (e-mail me if you want the RW chart) I caught many potential stockers, but only kept a few. 3) I love to fish and took pride in doing it the hard way...all it took was time, a 120 QT cooler (or two) and aerator(s).

My LMB are not hook shy, nice sized adult BG attack bait, both are still very high on the RW scale. Take your time, stock "top of the line" adults. It was well worth the effort in my case, it would have taken much longer for fry to grow out.

One last advantage in your favor, good fishing habits (knowing ponds/lakes in your area) could really become beneficial. You have a smaller environment that can easily be managed by adding or removing a few big ones

My pond is similar in size to yours and I wanted to stock larger fish for the same reasons. However, most of my local ponds have only barbs, carp and catfish. My local fish suppliers carried fish at about 1 3/4 to 2" so that was where I started. I stocked tilapia and another fish both of which are fast growing. When the tilapia started to spawn I started looking for a predator. I had several in mind and thought, no problem. Wrong, all of my local breeders were sold out for several hatches, all going to the US. The only predators I have now is a water snake and dragon fly larvae. I am dip netting small fish and giving them away. Long way around to saying, whichever way you wind up going, make sure both sides of your equation are available. The upside of stocking small fish was that I did a lot of work on the landscaping.