Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations school of small fish?

today i kept noticing fish hit the top of the water in one place. i finally walked down there and it was a few 12" bass in a school of some tiny little fish. the school was probably 5' in diameter. i have bluegill,res, and bass in the pond..oh yea and a few 1000 goldfish. any idea what these tiny little fish are? there a few native top water minnows around the ponds edge and newly hatched bg, but no idea what this school is.

It's most likely baby bass... The adult male bass are guarding the young.

Here are a LMB school and a small BG and one in an observation jar.

Small LMB:

At that size they'll devour baby brine shrimp like crazy!

there was probably 5 times as many as in the picture by ewest, and maybe a little smaller..we once saw the bass come across the top of the water like Jaws with his mouth open like he was just sucking in a whole bunch of these lil ones..

my bg went on the bed about may 1 or may 2. i can see bg around the edges in schools of 50 or so each, just not thousands like this one big school.

In the LMB pic above you can see about 20% of the school. The rest are a little deeper and under the dock.

will baby bg school the same way or are they only going to stay in small numbers near the shore as i have been observing?

Small BG will school up like baby bass, but they usually hug tight to cover for protection. The bass with his jaws wide open coming through the school is the male bass putting a show on to other fish trying to eat his babies. He opens his mouth and tries to look mean and BIG. This will hopefully scare other fish away who are trying to eat his babies. He is not feeding on those little fingerlings in all likelihood.

or feeding on them! Seriously, if the ball of fry is out over deeper open water instead of near the shore, those 12" bass are balling them up tight and feeding on them.

they were 10 ft from the shore at least...we had observed some activity in that area for 10 minutes or so before we walked down there and saw the school of fry..looked like more than one bass in with them..
saw them again this morning and only one bass underneath the school and he didnt look to be eating them. just circling under them

For the first week after they hatch the male will protect the fry, once the fry get a little bigger they will be fair game as far as menu items go. You might even catch some of the larger BG eating the bass fry as well.