Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Corrective stocking Perch Stocking

Any opinions on stocking 8-10 in. Perch in a 5 acre lake that is fairly well balanced but can always use fewer small BG. Word is LMB like them and they like to BG eggs.

Tom:
You came to the perfect place to get your answer, and you will soon. The guys put their hearts and souls into this forum and magazine (hope you get it). I have been blessed with helpful information from The PondBoss Family - these guys are the best! Welcome.

Yellow Perch are both predators and prey. They will probably be the earliest spawners in the pond.

Without anymore details on what else you have in your pond, I would add a small quantity at first to test drive them.

Maybe 40 or 50?

When you say your pond can always use fewer smaller BG, are you saying that your pond is slightly BG heavy? In the case of northern ponds, I recommend you start your pond out without YP(yellow perch). Then after a few years for your pond to reach a balance, if the LMB are doing a good job of keeping the BG under control then you can consider adding YP knowing the LMB are already doing a good job of handling the BG. Now if the LMB are not keeping up with the BG, there is no reason to think they will keep up with the YP and this may lead to stunting of the YP.

The more submerged vegetation the pond has the more likely the perch will survive and successfully reproduce and recruit more perch into the pond. If slowed perch growth occurs this means that they will stay at a smaller size for a longer period of time to feed a larger year class of smaller bass. The expect the bass to tend to become abundant. Keep an eye on the overall balance of all the sport fish present. Keep weed growth less than 30% of the surface area and balance should ramain "normal"

it is my understanding that the YP will help contain the BG

Some, but I wouldn't put too much reliance on them to do so.

Bass have a preference for eating yellow perch over bluegill due to the body shape. It has been my experience that yellow perch stocked into a pond containing adult bass do not last long. Even 8-10 inchers are susceptible to predation by 16-20 inch bass.

Based on your comment that you have plenty of small bluegills I would assume that the few bass you have are large. The bass may focus on consuming your newly stocked perch and only make your stunted bluegill problem worse.

As Bill Cody said, I think a lot of it has to do with habitat such as aquatic vegetation. A 3 acre pond I fished a lot as a kid in Pennsylvania had a very healthy YP population along with a very heavy LMB population. The pond did have a lot of aquatic vegetation and good structure. Most of the LMB were in the 8-12 range, the YP were 7"-12". There was also a very nice size range of BG, PSS and BCP.

Tom's property is pretty unique from most to say the least. They have about 10 lakes nestled onto a couple hundred acres of timber.

I recommended stocking 300 adult perch into one of the medium sized 5 acre lakes to add diversity to the overall fishing property. Also in mind would be to implement a walleye stocking program down the road on this lake if we can get the perch established before the humans and bigger fish eat them all.

All the lakes on the property are stocked with LMB, BG, RES, BC, CC and a small handful of NP. The main lakes have tremendous overall fisheries, we were just looking at sprucing things up a bit on some of the lesser fished lakes.

Tom has been a Pond Boss subscriber for about a year now! He is even getting his fishing buddies going on the mag!

Quality of habitat will determine the success adding the larger YP to the lake. Proper habitat and food are two of the main parts of a good fishery.