Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Corrective stocking Stocking blue cats with established LMB population

Anyone have experience with stocking a pond established with LMB using 8" blue catfish? I believe since the pond has plenty of bluegill and other small bait fish, the bass will not feed on the healthy blue cats. The owner thinks the bass are going to thin out his newly stocked catfish, and has begun removing a lot of the bass. Any thoughts?

Steve

Depends on how large the bass are, but 8" stocker blue cats may get eaten pretty heavily before they are able to reach a size large enough to avoid predation by the bass. You may want to look into getting slightly larger fingerling blue cats, perhaps 12" or so...

Raise them behind a blocking net, or in a cage until they get big enough?

I doubt that he will be able to catch enough larger size bass to keep down predation of 8" fish. Of course, it all depends on just how large the bass are.

Just my experience. I put 75 12" Blues in a 1 acre pond in Sept 2008 with an established bass heavy population. In the following 30 days I took out 75 bass around 12" and one 5.5 lb'er.

In January I drained the pond. There were 25 bass left and I only found 42 of the original 75 blue cats.

42/75 original stockers isn't that bad a number for an already established pond... How big where the stockers when you took them out?

Well being that i put them in right at the end of the growing season and then took them out in four months(january) they really didn't have much change.